Virginia was sentenced to perpetual incarceration in the convent of S. Valeria at Milan. She was to be 'inclosed within a little dungeon, the door of which shall be walled up with stones and mortar, so that the said Virginia Maria shall abide there for the term of her natural life, immured both day and night, never to issue thence, but shall receive food and other necessaries through a small hole in the wall of the said chamber, and light and air through an aperture or other opening.' This sentence was carried into effect. But at the expiration of many years, her behavior justified some mitigation of the penalty. She was set at large, and allowed to occupy a more wholesome apartment, where the charity of Cardinal Borromeo supplied her with comforts befitting her station, and the reputation she acquired for sanctity. Her own family cherished implacable sentiments of resentment against the woman who had brought disgrace upon them. Ripamonte, the historian of Milan, says that in his own time she was still alive: 'a bent old woman, tall of stature, dried and fleshless, but venerable in her aspect, whom no one could believe to have been once a charming and immodest beauty.' Her associates in guilt, the nuns of S. Margherita, were consigned to punishments resembling hers. Sisters Benedetta, Silvia and Candida suffered the same close incarceration.
Lucrezia Buonvisi
The tale of Lucrezia Buonvisi presents some points of similarity to that of the Signora di Monza.[191]
Her father was a Lucchese gentleman, named Vincenzo Malpigli, who passed the better portion of his life at Ferrara, as treasurer to Duke Afonsono II. He had four children; one son, Giovan Lorenzo, and three daughters, of whom Lucrezia, born at Lucca in 1572, was probably the youngest. Vincenzo's wife sprang from the noble Lucchese family of Buonvisi, at that time by their wealth and alliances the most powerful house of the Republic. Lucrezia spent some years of her girlhood at Ferrara, where she formed a romantic friendship for a nobleman of Lucca named Massimiliano Arnolfini. This early attachment was not countenanced by her parents. They destined her to be the wife of one of Paolo Buonvisi's numerous sons, her relatives upon the mother's side. In consequence of this determination, she was first affianced to an heir of that house, who died; again to another, who also died; and in the third place to their brother, called Lelio, whom she eventually married in the year 1591. Lelio was then twenty-five years of age, and Lucrezia nineteen. Her beauty was so distinguished, that in poems written on the ladies of Lucca it received this celebration in a madrigal:—
Like the young maiden rose
Which at the opening of the dawn,
Still sprinkled with heaven's gracious dew,
Her beauty and her bosom on the lawn
Doth charmingly disclose,
For nymphs and amorous swains with love to view;
So delicate, so fair, Lucrezia yields
New pearls, new purple to our homely fields,
While Cupid plays and Flora laughs in her fresh hue.
Less than a year after her marriage with Lelia Buonvisi, Lucrezia resumed her former intimacy with Massimiliano Arnolfini. He was scarcely two yeara her elder, and they had already exchanged vows of fidelity in Ferrara. Massimiliano's temper inclined him to extreme courses; he was quick and fervent in all the disputes of his age, ready to back his quarrels with the sword, and impatient of delay in any matter he had undertaken. Owing to a feud which then subsisted between the families of Arnolfini and Boccella, he kept certain bravi in his service, upon whose devotion he relied. This young man soon found means to open a correspondence with Lucrezia, and arranged meetings with her in the house of some poor weavers who lived opposite the palace of the Buonvisi. Nothing passed between them that exceeded the limits of respectful court ship. But the situation became irksome to a lover so hot of blood as Massimiliano was. On the evening of June 5, in 1593, his men attacked Lelio Buonvisi, while returning with Lucrezia from prayers in an adjacent church. Lelio fell, stabbed with nineteen thrusts of the poignard, and was carried lifeless to his house. Lucrezia made her way back alone; and when her husband's corpse was brought into the palace, she requested that it should be laid out in the basement. A solitary witness of this act of violence, Vincenzo di Coreglia, deposed to having raised the dying man from the ground, put earth into his mouth by way of Sacrament, and urged him to forgive his enemies before he breathed his last. The weather had been very bad that day, and at nightfall it was thundering incessantly.
Inquisition was made immediately into the causes of Lelio's death. According to Lucrezia's account, her husband had reproved some men upon the road for singing obscene songs, whereupon they turned and murdered him. The corpse was exposed in the Church of the Servi, where multitudes of people gathered round it; and there an ancient dame of the Buonvisi house, flinging herself upon her nephew's body, vowed vengeance, after the old custom of the Vocero, against his murderers. Other members of the family indicated Massimiliano as the probable assassin; but he meantime had escaped, with three of his retainers, to a villa of his mother's at S. Pancrazio, whence he managed to take the open country and place himself in temporary safety. During this while, the judicial authorities of Lucca were not idle. The Podestà issued a proclamation inviting evidence, under the menace of decapitation and confiscation of goods for whomsoever should be found to have withheld information. To this call a certain Orazio Carli, most imprudently, responded. He confessed to having been aware that Massimiliano was plotting the assassination of somebody—not Lelio; and said that he had himself facilitated the flight of the assassins by preparing a ladder, which he placed in the hands of a bravo called Ottavio da Trapani. This revelation delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to the judicial authorities, who at the same time imprisoned Vincenzo da Coreglia, the soldier present at the murder.
Massimiliano and his men meanwhile had made their way across the frontier to Garfagnana. Their flight, and the suspicions which attached to them, rendered it tolerably certain that they were the authors of the crime. But justice demanded more circumstantial information, and the Podestà decided to work upon the two men already in his clutches. On June 4, Carli was submitted to the torture. The rack elicited nothing new from him, but had the result of dislocating his arms. He was then placed upon an instrument called the 'she-goat,' a sharp wooden trestle, to which the man was bound with weights attached to his feet, and where he sat for nearly four hours. In the course of this painful exercise, he deposed that Massimiliano and Lucrezia had been in the habit of meeting in the house of Vincenzo del Zoppo and Pollonia his wife, where the bravi also congregated and kept their arms. Grave suspicion was thus cast on Lucrezia. Had she perchance connived at her husband's murder? Was she an accomplice in the tragedy?
Lucrezia's peril now became imminent. Her brother, Giovan Lorenzo Malpigli, who remained her friend throughout, thought it best for her to retire as secretly as possible into a convent. The house chosen was that of S. Chiara in the town of Lucca. On June 5, she assumed the habit of S. Francis, cut her hair, changed her name from Lucrezia to Umilia, and offered two thousand crowns of dower to this monastery. Only four days had elapsed since her husband's assassination. But she, at all events, was safe from immediate peril; for the Church must now be dealt with; and the Church neither relinquished its suppliants, nor disgorged the wealth they poured into its coffers. The Podestà, when news of this occurrence reached him, sent at once to make inquiries. His messenger, Ser Vincenzo Petrucci, was informed by the Abbess that Lucrezia had just arrived and was having her hair shorn. At his request, the novice herself appeared—'a young woman, tall and pale, dressed in a nun's habit, with a crown upon her head.' She declared herself to be 'Madonna Lucretiina Malpigli, widow of Lelio Buonvisi.' The priest who had conducted her reception, affirmed that 'the gentle lady, immediately upon her husband's death, conceived this good prompting of the spirit, and obeyed it on the spot.'
For the moment, Lucrezia, whom in future we must call Sister Umilia, had to be left unmolested. The judges returned to the interrogation of their prisoners. Vincenzo del Zoppo and his wife Pollonia, in whose house the lovers used to meet, were tortured; but nothing that implied a criminal correspondence transpired from their evidence. Then the unlucky Carli was once more put to the strappado. He fell into a deep swoon, and was with difficulty brought to life again. Next his son, a youth of sixteen years, was racked with similar results. On June 7, they resolved to have another try at Vincenzo da Coreglia. This soldier had been kept on low diet in his prison during the last week, and was therefore ripe, according to the judicial theories of those times, for salutary torments. Having been strung up by his hands, he was jerked and shaken in the customary fashion, until he declared his willingness to make a full confession. He had been informed, he said, that Massimiliano intended to assassinate Lelio by means of his three bravi, Pietro da Castelnuovo, Ottavio da Trapani, and Niccolo da Pariana. He engaged to stand by and cover the retreat of these men. It was Carli, and not Massimiliano, who had made overtures to him. On being once more tortured, he only confirmed this confession. Carli was again summoned, and set upon the 'she-goat,' with heavy weights attached to his feet. The poor wretch sat for two hours on this infernal machine, the sharp edges and spikes of which were so contrived as to press slowly and deeply upon the tenderest portions of his body.[192] But he endured this agony without uttering a word, until the judges perceived that he was at the point of death. Next day, the 8th of June, Coreglia was again summoned to the justice-chamber. Terrified by the prospect of future torments, and wearied out with importunities, he at last made a clean breast of all he knew. It was not Carli, but Massimiliano himself, who had engaged him; and he had assisted at the murder of Lelio, which was accomplished by two of the bravi, Ottavio and Pietro. Coreglia said nothing to implicate Sister Umilia. On the contrary he asserted that she seemed to lose her senses when she saw her husband fall.