A complex, free character, of fine artistic sensitivity and profound religious feelings, in a harsh, violent, contradictory century: he is Victoryprincess Columnmarried to Don Ferrante d’Avalos, and therefore Marchioness of Pescara by marriage.
Giulia Albericoafter having dedicated enchanting pages to the Lady of Flanders, Margherita, in the novel of the same name, released by Piemme in 2021, continues her journey and her historical, political, literary research with the book Vittoria’s secret (Piemme, 2024) in which he deals, with his usual mastery, with the little-researched personality of Vittoria, who lived “in Michelangelo’s time”, partly in Rome, but also in many other parts of the peninsula, following the destiny that her birth had assigned her.
Born in Marino, Colonna fiefdom, in 1492, she had as her faithful companion, throughout her life, a woman, Soso, a fictional character who offers the writer the narrative pretext to tell Vittoria’s secrets after she died, still relatively young , at the home of a niece, in Palazzo Cesarini.
In the novel, the voices of the faithful Soso alternate, who knows all the secrets of her protégé, even what no one had ever known: the physical anomaly that prevented the young princess from having a complete sexual life.
Vittoria will still marry the handsome warrior Don Ferrante d’Avalos, whom she will love with all her heart; he too, venerating her wife, will accept that he cannot do it with her, keeping her diversity secret from everyone. The two will live their emotional relationship in the castle of Ischia, a magical place for the young bride, inebriated by the smell of rosemary, of which she smelled the groom’s breath.
After her early death, Vittoria’s emotional loneliness will be total; despite the insistence of her aunt Costanza d’Avalos to contract a new marriage, she decides to enter a convent. But this will not be granted to her either by her brother Ascanio, who wants her sister to support the Colonna family’s support for the imperials, nor by the Pope, at the time Clement VII.
Vittoria Colonna he spent much of his time in Rome, in the convent of San Silvestro in Capite, guest of the sisters who benefited from the support of the Colonna family, writing, writing poetry, maintaining epistolary relationships with the most representative figures of the life of the time: cardinals Reginald Pole and Contarini, both representatives of that part of the Catholic Church that hoped for a reform that would arise within it, to respond to the just demands of Luther, who saw corruption, immorality and nepotism in the papal court and in the Roman curia.
We are in the years of the Council of Trent, and Vittoria does her part in supporting the men and women who felt closest to that movement called the Spirituals, which advocated a return to the Gospel. Here then are the figures of the Spanish Valdès, that of Giulia Gonzaga, the Duchess of Ferrara Renata of France and her daughters, Caterina Cybo, Isabella Beseno, courageous men and women, determined to challenge the wrath of Pope Paul III Farnese, who he had created the Holy Office, which became the ferocious tribunal of the Inquisition under his successor Paul IV Carafa.
In this life dedicated to spirituality, to faith understood as testimony of a commitment to the service of the Community, the figure of the master Michelangelo bursts into the austere existence of the poet Vittoria, who was also observed by the religious authorities who feared his personality and the ideas that they bordered on the feared heresy.
The very sweet relationship between these two minds, the now elderly artist who lives in a shack in Macel de’ Corvi, the Roman artists’ district, and the austere Roman princess, is rendered by Alberico with a delicacy, a sweetness that through use of a language that I would define as “lyrical”, make the union of these two special souls truly extraordinary: the two do not speak, they sit on a simple bench, while their companions move away, to allow them that little bit of intimacy to which they inhaled secretly, while an orange blossom tree sheds its intense scent.
Esteem, consideration, affection, closeness, consonance of thoughts and impulses, this grows between the now old artist and the woman marked by a sentimental loneliness that only he was capable of awakening.
Giulia Alberico uses effective words to describe her protagonist, thin, lacking in appetite, suffering, who is described as:
“Disanimated, amputated, petrified, exhausted.”
Her whole life, which passes through an Italy marked by troops who want to take it over, until the Sack of Rome in 1527, sees her travel between Naples, Ischia, Viterbo, Vasto, Pescocostanzo, Ferrara, up to Venice and then returning to Rome , where her last months are spent, in the arms of the ever-present Soso, who will sing her the lullaby that greeted her as soon as she was born.
The “body denied, dry, walled up” of Vittoria, whose only portrait is the one that the great Sebastiano del Piombo made of her, speaks to us with the words of Giulia Alberico, who manages to make us feel close to a woman whose words only reach her in the lyrics that consecrated her as a Renaissance poet , but which do not fully reveal the unhappiness of a creature in love, sensitive, who has not been able to fully experience sexuality, and who has been able to sublimate a great love only in the almost silent encounter with an now old genius: but, says Vittoria ,”souls have no age”.
Beautiful novel, which testifies to the maturity reached by the writer, who manages, while outlining an accurate historical-religious fresco, to make the hearts of readers beat as they encounter an extraordinarily modern woman, endowed with intelligence of the heart, political intuition, refined culture , with a far-sighted vision of the future of a church that risked succumbing to the violence it was experiencing.
Vittoria Colonna died before the Counter-Reformation of Paul IV, remaining in the imagination with the words of the last tercet of the sonnet that Michelangelo dedicated to her:
“O woman who passes by
For water and fire the soul to happy days,
well, don’t come back to me anymore.”
