Note [285] page 150. The Prior of Messina is now identified by Cian as a Spanish soldier, Don Pedro de Cuña, who was killed at the battle of Ravenna in 1512.

Note [286] page 151. Of Paolo Tolosa nothing more is known than is contained in the text.

Note [287] page 151. Like purple in Roman times, rose was the aristocratic colour at this period. Cosimo is reported by Machiavelli (Storia Fiorentina, vii, 6) to have said that “two ells of rose-coloured cloth make a man of quality.”

Note [288] page 151. Gianotto de’ Pazzi is regarded by Cian as possibly identical with a certain Florentine, Giovanni de’ Pazzi, who was born in 1476 and died in 1528.

Note [289] page 151. Of Antonio Rizzo nothing more is known than is contained in the text.

Note [290] page 151. ‘The renunciation of a benefice,’ i.e. the notarial deed or testament by which a priest resigned his benefice or prebend in favour of someone else.

Note [291] page 151. Antonio Torello, (died 1536), was private chamberlain to Julius II and Leo X, who conferred a canonry and several prebends upon him in 1514. In the briefs he is designated as a priest of the diocese of Foglino, and is given certain benefices there, which had fallen vacant on the death of another priest. We thus infer that Torello must have been familiar with the subject referred to in the text. He was made a Roman citizen in 1530.

Note [292] page 151. These two hunchbacks have not been identified. “The Wheel” (la Ruota or Rota della Giustizia, or simply la Rota) was the highest civil and criminal court of Rome prior to 1870. Its name may have originated in the circular arrangement of the judges’ (auditors’) seats (compare the hemicyclium of Cicero’s time), or possibly in a wheel-shaped porphyry figure set in the pavement of the hall where they sat. The play is of course on the double meaning of the word torto, crooked, wrong.

Note [293] page 151. Latino Giovenale de’ Manetti, (born 1486; died 1553), was a native of Rome, and a canon of St. Peter’s, but being of minor rank he had a wife and children. He held various offices, including that of Commissary General of Roman Antiquities, and was employed in several papal embassies. A writer of Latin and Italian verse, he was a friend of Castiglione, Bembo and Bibbiena, and is mentioned in the autobiography of Cellini, who says that he “had a pretty big dash of the fool in him,”—apparently because he presumed to improve one of the sculptor’s designs for a crucifix.

Note [294] page 152. Peralta is regarded by Cian as probably identical with a certain Captain Luijse Galliego de Peralta, who bore a letter (1521) from Castiglione at Rome to the Marquess Federico of Mantua, then fighting against the French. In this letter Castiglione speaks of having known Peralta for years as “a man of character and a valiant.” Cian regards him as identical also with a certain Colonel Peralta, whose death at the battle of Frosinone is mentioned (in a letter of 1526) among those of other Spaniards.