Galliccioli, iii. 210.
to their villa in Murano for a few weeks in the fine season. She was not even taken to church, because, some eighty years, earlier, a young girl called Giovanna di Riviera, when going to mass with her mother on the morning of the third of March 1482, had been picked up and literally carried off by a too enterprising lover. After that, young girls of good birth were not allowed to go to church, and mass was said for them in a little chapel at home.
Bianca was so terribly bored that she began to make signs to Pietro from her window. She had nothing else to do. One of her most important occupations was to sun her hair on the high ‘altana.’ That was a real pleasure, for the palace was gloomy, though it was new, and her room felt like a prison cell; but she could not be always sunning her hair.
The young banker’s clerk responded to her signals of distress with alacrity, and a dumb love affair began, apparently highly approved by the youth’s uncle, who was a man of business. On the night
1564.
between the twenty-eighth and the twenty-ninth of December the two eloped and got away from Venice without being caught.
Bartolommeo Cappello’s appeal to the Council of Ten is extant. I give the most interesting part of it:—
‘I shall here expose, and not without tears, the cruel and atrocious deed of which I was the victim on the night of December the twenty-ninth. The scoundrel Pietro Bonaventuri, with the consent of his uncle, Giovanni Battista, and of accomplices whom I know not ... entered my house, which is almost opposite his, and carried off my only daughter, sixteen years old; he first took her to his house and then hid her from place to place, to my great dishonour and that of all my family.’
The document goes on in a strain of lamentation, and ends with the request that the Council of Ten should set a price on the head of the seducer, and bring the girl back to be locked up in a convent; and the unhappy father offered a prize of six thousand lire to any one who would bring him Pietro Bonaventuri, alive or dead. The letter expresses more hatred of the lover than sorrow for the lost child.
The Ten proceeded in the matter without delay; Pietro’s uncle was thrown into prison, and died there soon afterwards of a putrid fever. Bianca’s woman-servant and the latter’s husband, who was a gondolier, and who had, of course, both been acquainted with the plan of her flight, were arrested and tortured; as for Pietro and Bianca, they had been already some time in Florence, where they learned that they had both been condemned to death by default. The Ten had proceeded against the insignificant banker’s clerk with terrible energy.