The Roman Tales

After eight years of this kind of life, the captain died. His aide-de-camp Ranuccio adored Giulio but, growing tired of idleness, the older man returned to Prince Colonna’s service. He often came to visit ‘his son Giulio’, as he called him, and on the eve of a dangerous assault on the prince’s castle of La Petrella, Ranuccio had taken Giulio to fight alongside him.

Noting the boy’s prowess, the old soldier said, ‘You must be a great simpleton to live near Albano as the lowest and poorest inhabitant of the place when, with your father’s name and what I could do for you, you could be one of our leading soldiers of fortune and make yourself a pile of money.’

Giulio was tormented by these his words. He’d learned some Latin from a priest, but as his father had always scoffed at everything the priest said, apart from Latin Giulio had received no education. Despised for his poverty, isolated in his lonely house, he had nevertheless developed a certain degree of good sense whose boldness would have astonished learned men. For instance, before he fell in love with Elena, and without knowing why, he adored fighting but loathed looting and pillage, which, in his father and Ranuccio’s eyes, was akin to the short farce that follows the high tragedy. Since Giulio had fallen in love with Elena, the good sense he had acquired through his lonely ponderings tormented him. This soul, once so carefree but now full of passion and misery, dared confide in no one. What would Signor de’ Campireali say if he knew Giulio to be a soldier of fortune? Any accusation he could now level against Giulio would be justifiable.

Giulio had always relied on soldiering as a sure means of earning his way when he’d spent what he could get for the gold chains and other trinkets he’d discovered in his father’s strongbox. If, poor as he was, Giulio had no scruples about carrying off the daughter of the wealthy Signor de’ Campireali, it was because in those days fathers disposed of their possessions as they thought fit, and Signor de’ Campireali might well leave his daughter a mere thousand scudi. Giulio was preoccupied with a different problem. First, where would he settle with young Elena once he had carried her off and married her? Second, what would they live on?

After Signor de’ Campireali’s cutting insult, which so wounded Giulio, he spent two days in a wild state of fury and despair. He had nearly decided to kill the insolent old man and spent night after night in tears, until at last he determined to consult Ranuccio, his only friend in the whole world. But would his friend understand?

Scouring the Faggiola forest in vain, Giulio finally found the old soldier on the Naples road beyond Velletri, where Ranuccio was setting up an ambush. He was lying in wait with a considerable force for Ruiz d’Avalos, the Spanish general, who was on his way to Rome by an inland route, forgetful that just before, in a large gathering, he had spoken scornfully of Prince Colonna’s soldiers of fortune. His chaplain reminded the general in no uncertain terms of this little matter. Ruiz d’Avalos decided to arm a ship and proceed to Rome by sea.

As soon as Captain Ranuccio heard Giulio’s tale, he said, ‘Give me an exact description of this Signor de’ Campireali before his rashness costs the life of some worthy citizen of Albano. As soon as we’ve finished our business here, whatever the outcome, you’ll go to Rome and make yourself conspicuous in all the inns and public places. You must not be suspected because of your love for the girl.’

After struggling to calm his father’s old friend, Giulio was forced to get angry with him. ‘Do you think I’m asking for your sword?’ he said. ‘I assure you, I have a sword of my own. It’s your advice I’m asking for.’

As always, Ranuccio concluded with these words. ‘You are young; you’ve never been wounded. It was a public insult. A man whose honour has been besmirched is despised even by women.’

Giulio told him he wanted to give more thought to what his heart desired. Despite Ranuccio’s insistence that he take part in the ambush on the Spanish general’s escort, where, he said, there was honour to be won, not to mention doubloons, Giulio returned to his little house. It was there that, on the eve of the day Signor de’ Campireali fired on him with his arquebus, Giulio had received Ranuccio and his corporal on their return from Velletri. Ranuccio forced open the little strongbox in which Captain Branciforte used to keep the gold chains and other jewels which he thought it unwise to sell immediately after a raid. Ranuccio found two scudi.

‘I advise you to become a monk,’ he said to Giulio. ‘You have all the qualifications. Love of poverty – here’s the proof. And humility. You let yourself be vilified in the middle of the street in full view of everyone by a wealthy citizen of Albano. All you lack is hypocrisy and greed.’

Ranuccio insisted on putting fifty doubloons into the strongbox. ‘I give you my word,’ he said to Giulio, ‘that if in a month’s time Signor de’ Campireali is not buried with all the honour due his nobility and wealth, my corporal here will come with thirty men and raze your house and burn your miserable furniture. Captain Branciforte’s son must not on the excuse of love cut a sorry figure in this world.’

That evening, when Signor de’ Campireali and his son fired twice, Ranuccio and his corporal had taken up positions under the stone balcony. Giulio had with difficulty restrained them from killing Fabio or abducting him when he rashly came into the garden. To calm Ranuccio, Giulio reasoned that a young man like Fabio might make something useful of himself, while a guilty old sinner like his father was no good for anything but to be buried.

The day after this exploit Ranuccio hid deep in the forest, and Giulio left for Rome. His pleasure in buying fine clothes with Ranuccio’s doubloons was cruelly offset by a very unusual idea for those days and one which led to the success he ultimately achieved. ‘Elena must know me for who I am,’ he thought. Any other man of his day would simply have revelled in the game of love and carried Elena off, not caring what she might have thought of him or what became of her six months later.

On the afternoon that Giulio displayed the fine clothes he’d bought in Rome, he discovered from his friend old Scotti that Fabio had left town on horseback for a property of his father’s down on the plain. Giulio later saw Signor de’ Campireali, accompanied by two priests, setting off along the magnificent avenue of green oaks that crowns the rim of the crater in which the lake of Albano lies. Ten minutes later an old woman came marching into the Palazzo Campireali, pretending to be selling fruit.

The first person she met was Elena’s maid and confidante Marietta. The girl blushed to the roots of her hair when she was presented with a beautiful bouquet. The letter hidden in it was unusually long. Giulio recounted what had happened to him since the night of the gunshots. But, owing to his unusual modesty, he did not dare admit what any other young man of his time would have been proud to reveal – that he was the son of a captain renowned for his exploits and that he himself had already shown his courage in more than one battle. Giulio could imagine what old Campireali would say about this. Sixteenth-century girls, in sympathy with republican ideas, admired a man much more for what he had made of himself than for the fortune amassed by his forebears or for their famous exploits. That is, girls from the common people thought this way. Daughters of the wealthy or noble classes were afraid of bandits, and, quite naturally, held nobility and wealth in great esteem.

Giulio finished his letter with these words:

I do not know if the fashionable clothes I bought in Rome will banish from your memory the cruel affront someone close to you made about my repulsive appearance. I could have taken revenge; I should have. My honour demanded it. I have not done it because of the tears my revenge would have cost those eyes I adore. This may prove to you, if by chance you still doubt it, that a man can be poor but still have noble sentiments. I have something to confess. I would have no difficulty telling this to any other woman but somehow I tremble at the thought of revealing it to you. It could in an instant destroy the love you have for me, and no protestation on your part would satisfy me. I want to read in your eyes the effect this admission will have. One of these days, at nightfall, I will visit you in the garden behind the palazzo. That day, Fabio and your father will be away. When I’m sure that they will not be able to deprive us of an hour or so of conversation, a man will appear beneath your windows and show the local children a tame fox. Later, when the Ave Maria sounds, you’ll hear a gunshot in the distance. At that moment, go to your garden wall and, if you are not alone, sing. If you hear nothing, your slave will appear trembling at your feet and will tell you things that may horrify you. While waiting for this terrible day, I will risk giving you no more midnight posies, but at about two in the morning I will pass by singing, and perhaps from your balcony you’ll drop a flower picked from your garden. This may be the last signs of affection you will show your unhappy Giulio.

Three days later, Elena’s father and brother rode off to the lands they owned by the sea. They left just before sunset, intending to return at around two in the morning. But as they were about to start back not only their two horses but all the horses on the farm disappeared. Outraged by this daring theft, they searched for their animals, which were not found until the following day. They were grazing in a forest of tall trees beside the sea. The two Campireali men had to return to Albano in an oxcart.

Darkness that evening found Giulio at Elena’s feet, and the poor girl glad of the gathering dusk. For the first time she was face to face with the man she loved but to whom she had never spoken.

She uttered a word or two, which restored his courage. Giulio was paler and more shaken than she.

‘It’s hard for me to speak,’ he said. Several blissful moments passed while they looked at each other without a word. Giulio took Elena’s hand. She gazed at him closely.

He knew his friends, young Roman rakes, would have advised him to make advances, but the idea horrified him. Yet at the same time he knew that ecstatic state which only love can bring. Time passed swiftly. The Campireali men neared the palace. Honest soul that he was, Giulio realized that he would not find lasting happiness unless he made the terrible admission which would have seemed utter stupidity to his Roman friends.

At last, he said, ‘I spoke to you of a confession which perhaps I should not make.’ Growing pale, he added, ‘Perhaps your feelings for me, on which my life depends, will vanish. You think I’m poor, but that’s not the worst of it. I’m an outlaw and the son of an outlaw.’

At his words, rich man’s daughter that she was and with all the prejudices of her class, Elena felt she would faint.

‘How terrible that would be for poor Giulio,’ she thought. ‘He will think I despise him.’ Leaning against him, she sank into his arms as if in a swoon.

After this night many assignations followed. The danger she was running took away Elena’s remorse. Sometimes the dangers were extreme, but they only enflamed these two hearts for whom all feelings arising from their love were joyful. Frequently on the point of surprising the young pair, Fabio and his father were furious at finding themselves defied. Town gossip said Giulio was Elena’s lover, yet father and son could detect nothing. Fabio suggested that he be allowed to kill Giulio.

‘While he lives, my sister’s life is in peril. At any moment honour may force us to drench our hands in the blood of the obstinate girl. She has become so bold she no longer denies her love. You see how she answers our accusations with gloomy silence. Very well, this silence is Giulio Branciforte’s death sentence.’

‘Remember what his father was,’ replied old Campireali. ‘We could easily go to Rome for six months, during which time this Branciforte would disappear. But there’s the question of his father, who, despite his villainy, was a good and generous man – generous enough to enrich many of his soldiers while he himself stayed poor. Who knows whether he hasn’t still got friends either in the Duke of Monte Mariano’s company or in Prince Colonna’s, which often lies a couple of miles away in the Faggiola forest? In which case we’d be slaughtered without mercy – you, me, and perhaps your poor mother too.’

Several such conversations took place between father and son and were only in part kept from Vittoria Carafa, sending her into despair. In the end, the two men concluded that honour demanded they silence the rumours circulating round Albano. As it was unwise to have Branciforte removed, though he seemed to grow bolder every day and, what was more, now dressed in fine clothes to push his advantage, sometimes even speaking in public either to Fabio or to Signor de’ Campireali, they would have to undertake one or perhaps both of the following courses. Either the whole family would go back to live in Rome or Elena must return to the Convent of the Visitation in Castro, where she would remain until they found her a suitable match.

Elena had never confessed her love to her mother. Mother and daughter cared dearly for each other and were always together, yet not a word was uttered on the subject that was of almost equal importance to them both. The matter was only broached when the mother told her daughter that the whole household might be returning to Rome and Elena to Castro for a number of years.

It was rash of Vittoria Carafa to have spoken, and her affection for her daughter was no excuse. Elena, head over heels in love, wanted to prove to her lover that she was not ashamed of his poverty and that her confidence in his honour was boundless.

Unbelievable though it may seem, after so many bold assignations in the garden and once in her own room, Elena was chaste. Steadfast in her virtue, she suggested to her lover that she should leave the palazzo through the garden after midnight and spend the rest of the night in Giulio’s little house. They disguised themselves as Franciscan friars. Tall and slender, Elena looked like a novice of eighteen or twenty. The incredible fact – which confirms the finger of God – is that on the narrow path hewn in the rock that hugs the wall of the Capuchin friary, Giulio and his mistress met Signor de’ Campireali and Fabio, who, followed by four well-armed servants and preceded by a page carrying a lighted brand, were returning from Castel Gandolfo, a nearby lakeside town. To allow the lovers to pass, the Campireali men and their servants drew aside to right and left of the eight-foot-wide path. How much better it might have turned out for Elena had she been recognized there and then. She would have been shot dead by her father or brother, and her suffering would have lasted but an instant. But heaven ordained otherwise.

Another strange event occurred during the course of this unexpected encounter. Observing that the elder monk failed to greet either him or his father while passing so close, Fabio cried out, ‘What proud rascal of a monk have we here? God knows what he’s up to outside the monastery, he and his companion, at this late hour! I have a mind to pull off their hoods and see what they look like.’

At these words, Giulio clutched the dagger under his habit and stepped in front of Elena. He was less than a foot from Fabio, but heaven decreed otherwise and by a miracle calmed the fury of the two young men, who would soon meet each other just as close. At Elena de’ Campireali’s subsequent trial, this nocturnal excursion was cited as proof of her depravity. It was, however, the madness of a young girl aflame with love but whose heart was pure.

III

The Orsini, perennial rivals of the Colonna and pre-eminent in the villages around Rome, had managed to get the government courts to sentence to death a certain Baldassare Bandini, a rich farmer. Though most of the long list of misdeeds he was accused of would today be criminal offences, in 1559 they were usually regarded in a less severe light. Bandini was held six leagues from Albano in one of the Orsini castles in the mountains near Valmontone.

The chief of the Roman secret police, accompanied by a hundred and fifty of his men, travelled the highroad by night to fetch Bandini and take him to the Tordinona prison, in Rome. Bandini had appealed to Rome against his sentence. As he hailed from La Petrella, the Colonna stronghold, Bandini’s wife publicly confronted Fabrizio Colonna.

‘Are you going to let one of your faithful servants die?’ she demanded.

‘It is not God’s will that I should in any way fail in the respect I owe the decisions of the courts of my lord the pope,’ Colonna replied.

At once his soldiers and all his followers were ordered to meet near Valmontone, a small town built on a rocky outcrop whose ramparts were formed by an almost vertical precipice sixty to eighty feet high. It was in this town, belonging to the pope, that the Orsini partisans and government secret police had managed to capture Bandini. Among these partisans were Signor de’ Campireali and his son Fabio, who were distantly related to the Orsini. Giulio Branciforte and his father, however, had always been of the Colonna faction.

In circumstances where Prince Colonna felt unable to act openly he resorted to a simple ruse. Most of the rich Roman farmers, then as now, belonged to one or other group of penitents. The penitents always appeared in public with their heads covered by a hood that hid their faces and had holes for the eyes. When the Colonna forces did not want it known that they were involved in an exploit, they persuaded their adherents to join them wearing the penitent’s costume.

In due course, it transpired that the removal of Bandini, which had been the talk of the town for a fortnight, would take place on a Sunday. That day, at two o’clock in the morning, the governor of Valmontone had the tocsin rung in all the Faggiola forest villages. A large number of peasants obeyed the summons.

As each little group of armed peasants left their village and disappeared into the forest, their number was halved. Colonna’s partisans were making for the meeting place set up by Fabrizio. Their leaders seemed convinced there would be no fighting that day, and the men had been ordered to spread this rumour. Prince Fabrizio crossed the forest with a picked band of supporters mounted on half-broken colts from his stud farm. He made a cursory inspection of his various detachments of peasants but he did not speak to them. A single word might have given all away.

The prince, a tall, spare man of unusual strength and agility, was barely forty-five, but his hair and moustache were a striking white. This incongruous feature made him recognizable in places where he would have preferred to remain incognito. As soon as the peasants saw him they cried out, ‘Evviva Colonna!’, and pulled on their hoods. The prince himself wore his hood hanging round his neck so that he could slip it on the moment the enemy was sighted.

They did not have to wait long. The sun was rising as nearly a thousand men of the Orsini faction entered the forest three hundred yards from Fabrizio Colonna’s force, who threw themselves to the ground. After the Orsini advance guard passed, the prince mustered his men. He decided to attack Bandini’s escort a quarter of an hour after they entered the woods. Here the forest is strewn with boulders fifteen or twenty feet tall. These are lumps of lava, some old, some newer, which the chestnut canopy covers completely, almost cutting out the daylight. As these rockfalls, eroded by the weather, make the ground very rough, to spare the highroad from endless ups and downs the lava has been dug away and in places the road is three or four feet lower than the forest floor.

Around Fabrizio’s planned battle site was a grassy clearing crossed at one end by the main road. Thereafter the road re-entered the forest, which here was thick with brambles and thorn bushes, making the undergrowth all but impenetrable. Fabrizio placed his peasants a hundred yards into the forest on either side of the road. At a signal from him, each man drew on his hood and positioned himself behind a tree with his arquebus at the ready. The prince’s soldiers hid behind the trees nearest the road. The peasants had express orders not to fire until the soldiers fired, and the soldiers were not to fire until the enemy was twenty paces away. Fabrizio had twenty trees hastily felled, so that their branches completely blocked the narrow road. Captain Ranuccio, with five hundred men, shadowed the Orsini advance guard. Ranuccio had been ordered not to attack until he heard the first gunshots from the barrier of felled trunks.

When Fabrizio Colonna saw that his soldiers and peasants were well placed, each behind his tree and braced for battle, he left at a gallop with his mounted men, among them Giulio Branciforte. The prince took a path to the right of the main road, which led to the end of the clearing.

They had barely set off when a large troop of riders appeared on the road from Valmontone. It was the secret police and Orsini’s horsemen escorting Baldassare Bandini. In their midst rode the prisoner, surrounded by four executioners dressed in red. They had been ordered to put Bandini to death if they thought Colonna’s partisans might be about to rescue him.

Colonna’s cavalry had just reached the edge of the clearing when the prince heard the first gunshots from the ambush he had set on the main road in front of the barricade. At once he and his cavalry charged towards the four executioners who surrounded Bandini.