Lucrezia Borgia

by Sarah Bradford, Luisa Agnese Dalla Fontana (Translator)

Overview

Vittima innocente delle spietate brame di potere del padre, il cardinale Rodrigo Borgia, divenuto poi papa Alessandro VI, e del fratello, il terribile Valentino, o leggendaria amante incestuosa e spietata avvelenatrice? La figura di Lucrezia Borgia è fra le più controverse e falsificate del nostro Rinascimento. In questa biografia Sarah Bradford ci propone un'inedita rilettura di Lucrezia nell'intento dichiarato di sottrarla alla leggenda e alla condanna morale. La sua ricostruzione, quanto mai documentata e avvincente, si basa sulle storie e le cronache dell'epoca, sui documenti originali conservati negli archivi, fra cui alcune lettere personali a tutt'oggi ignote e le fitte informazioni dei corrispondenti e degli ambasciatori delle corti italiane. Lucrezia appare così una donna determinata, partecipe a pieno titolo delle vicende politiche del suo tempo e in particolare di quelle, spregiudicate e delittuose, della famiglia Borgia, sempre capace di destreggiarsi con abilità fra le circostanze di un destino che altri avevano scelto per lei.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788852056574
Publisher:	MONDADORI
Publication date:	10/14/2014
Sold by:	ARNOLDO MONDADORI - EBKS
Format:	eBook
File size:	6 MB
Language:	Italian

About the Author

Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Previous books include biographies of Disraeli, George VI, Elizabeth II and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (America's Queen), as well as two previous accounts of the Borgia family. She lives in London.

Table of Contents

Author's Note List of Illustrations Maps Genealogical Tables showing the Borgia, Este and Aragona Families Acknowledgments Foreword

The Scene Cast of Principal Characters

Part One: The Pope's Daughter 1480-1501
1. The Pope's Daughter

2. Countess of Pesaro

3. The Borgia Renscent

4. The Tragic Duchess of Bisceglie

5. Turning Point

6. Farewell to Rome

Part Two: Duchess to Ferrara 1502-19
7. The Road to Ferrara

8. A New Life

9. The Heavens Conspire

10. The Dark Marquis

11. Duchess of Ferrara

12. The Congiura

13. Horrors and Tears

14. The Years of War, 1509-12

15. Lucrezia Triumphant

16. The Last year of Tranquillity

17. The End

Postscript

Archives Source Notes Bibliography Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Bradford’s zest for this era is contagious." —USA Today

"A lively view of Lucrezia, capturing the glamour and tragedy of her story." —The Wall Street Journal

"This is also a tender and intimate account of a misunderstood and passionate woman." —Elle

Editorial Reviews

Sarah Bradford's lively biography of Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519) manages to somewhat rehabilitate this notorious "monster of cruelty and deceit" without depriving us of the lurid gossip that makes her so appealing. Thus, this biography is rife with reports of incest, assassination, sexual debauchery and abuse, poisonings, court intrigue, and palace cabal, yet Lucrezia emerges as a shrewd, determined, tragic woman -- not as an ogre.

Historians who have attempted to rescue Lucrezia Borgia from her legend as a poisoner who slept with both her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother, Cesare Borgia, have mostly described her as a pawn. Indeed, before she was twenty-one she was twice married off to men who were disposed of once their political usefulness expired. (The first had to declare himself impotent and grant her a divorce; the second was strangled in his bed.) Bradford sees Lucrezia neither as a helpless victim nor a femme fatale but as a resourceful individual—an able administrator, a genuinely religious woman, and the equal in political skill, if not in brutality, of her notorious male relatives. When the family of her third husband balked at alliance with a woman described as the “greatest whore there ever was in Rome,” she used all her craft and charm to win them over—by, among other things, making her pious prospective father-in-law a gift of several nuns.

The New Yorker

Bradford's enthusiasm for the Borgia dynasty positively vibrates … Bradford's zest for this era is contagious, and the book would make a great gift for any young woman.
— USA Today

Deirdre Donahue

A sympathetic view of the Renaissance beauty's progress through a maze of political marriages to become the Duchess of Ferrara. Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519) has been unduly maligned by history, says veteran biographer Bradford (Elizabeth, 1996, etc.), attributing much of the bile to contemporary enemies of her family. The British author makes a good case, based on material from the relevant archives and careful reading of others' treatments. She depicts Lucrezia as a woman of great administrative skill who ruled Ferrara while her husband was continually absent, thanks to battles both political and martial. Her father Rodrigo was a cardinal and then pope, her brother Cesare an ambitious schemer, warrior, and murderer; Lucrezia outlived them both. Educated by her infamous family, as well as by circumstance to survive and thrive in a precarious world, she even managed to maintain an intimate correspondence with a lover who was fighting with forces opposed to her husband. (She also survived him.) All three of her marriages were arranged. Her father had already promised her to two other men by the time she was first wed at 13, but Rodrigo dissolved that marriage and arranged for another to the son of Alfonso II of Naples, with whom she had a son. When that marriage also became an inconvenience for the scheming Borgias, they made the young Alfonso an offer he couldn't refuse, certified that Lucrezia remained a virgin, and married her to another Alfonso, son of the Duke of Ferrara. After some initial problems with conception, she remained continually pregnant until the end of her life; the last birth killed her at age 39. Bradford lavishly describes the opulent particulars of Lucrezia'slife-clothing, food, dwellings, parties, bling-bling-but always keeps her focus on this most astonishing woman. A thoroughly researched, gracefully written revision of the most beguiling Borgia. Agency: Gillon Aitken

Kirkus Reviews