arding a lease of it in 1483.

With her entrance into second nuptials, her relations with Cardinal
Roderigo came to an end, and his two children by her, then in
Rome--Lucrezia and Giuffredo--went to take up their residence with
Adriana Orsini (nee de Mila) at the Orsini Palace on Monte Giordano. She
was a cousin of Roderigo's, and the widow of Lodovico Orsini, by whom
she had a son, Orso Orsini, who from early youth had been betrothed to
Giulia Farnese, the daughter of a patrician family, still comparatively
obscure, but destined through this very girl to rise to conspicuous
eminence.

For her surpassing beauty this Giulia Farnese has been surnamed La
Bella--and as Giulia La Bella was she known in her day--and she has been
immortalized by Pinturicchio and Guglielmo della Porta. She sat to the
former as a model for his Madonna in the Borgia Tower of the Vatican,
and to the latter for the statue of Truth which adorns the tomb of her
brother Alessandro Farnese, who became Pope Paul III.

Here in Adriana Orsini's house, where his daughter Lucrezia was being
educated, Cardinal Roderigo, now at the mature age of some six-and-fifty
years, made the acquaintance and became enamoured of this beautiful
golden-headed Giulia, some forty years his junior. To the fact that she
presently became his mistress--somewhere about the same time that
she became Orso Orsini's wife--is due the sudden rise of the House of
Farnese. This began with her handsome, dissolute brother Alessandro's
elevation to the purple by her lover, and grew to vast proportions
during his subsequent and eminently scandalous occupation of the Papal
Throne as Paul III.

In the year 1490 Lucrezia was the only one of Roderigo's children by
Vannozza who remained in Rome.

Giovanni Borgia was in Spain, whither he had gone on the death of his
brother Pedro Luis, to take posession of the Duchy of Gandia, which the
power of his father's wealth and vast influence at the Valencian Court
had obtained for that same Pedro Luis. To this Giovanni now succeeded.

Cesare Borgia--now aged fifteen--had for some two years been studying
his humanities in an atmosphere of Latinity at the Sapienza of Perugia.
There, if we are to believe the praises of him uttered by Pompilio, he
was already revealing his unusual talents and a precocious wit. In
the preface of the Syllabica on the art of Prosody dedicated to him by
Pompilio, the latter hails him as the hope and ornament of the Hous of