Mistress of the Vatican (6 page)

Defenseless against the charms of both Sforza and Olimpia, Paolo Nini agreed to marry her for a dowry of only five thousand scudi, shockingly low given the wealth and social status of the groom. Paolo was clearly smitten, willing to sacrifice money and reputation to marry the scandalous Olimpia. The dowry documents were signed on May 18, 1608.

Some four months later, on September 29, seventeen-year-old Olim-pia married Paolo Nini in the ninth-century Church of Saint Sixtus. The marriage of the richest man in town to the disgraced daughter of the town tax collector was an exciting event for Viterbo, and hundreds of guests must have crammed the church. Colorful tapestries would have hung from the drab, cold walls and the domed apse behind the altar, loaned by family and friends to add to the festive atmosphere.

The richly attired bride and groom would have walked down the aisle and up the fifteen steps to the main altar of Saint Sixtus for the holy

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sacrament of marriage—“What therefore God has put together, let not man put asunder.” According to Catholic belief, this sacrament marked their souls with a holy seal indicating that they belonged together as long as they both lived.

After the wedding, the father of the bride was supposed to give a huge feast at his home. Sforza would have invited not only family but church officials, local dignitaries, business contacts, and their extended families. Perhaps Sforza winced at the cost but then remembered how fortunate he was to unload his embarrassing daughter on so prestigious a family for such a scant dowry.

After the reception, the guests would have escorted the newlyweds in a festive procession through the winding medieval streets to the groom’s home. For more than seventy years the Nini family had owned two palaces facing each other across the narrow, curving Via Annio. Paolo’s father had lived in one, and Paolo lived in the other.

Built in the early sixteenth century, the Nini palaces were what we would consider sprawling town houses. They were the most modern buildings on the street, with large, flat fronts and regularly spaced windows. Olimpia’s new home was five windows across and three stories high. On the outside was an inscription in Latin stating that a Nini ancestor had enlarged and painted the house in 1543.

On either side of the building was a high arched carriage entrance, and underneath were stalls for the horses. The passages opened onto a courtyard. A courtyard was a most useful place for the day-to-day functioning of the household. Here the grooms brought the horses out of their stalls, brushed them, and hitched them up to carriages. Here was the tradesmen’s entrance, where carts rolled up laden with firewood, barrels of wine, or animal carcasses to be dropped off at the kitchen door.

In the courtyard, if there was sufficient room, was an herb garden for the cook and a flower garden where the mistress of the house could sit in the shade of a tree and contemplate the blooms. Also in the courtyard, as far away from the house and garden as possible, were the outhouses, though many larger houses had inside privies which drained into a pit in the basement.

The courtyard usually contained the well, if there was one, and

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Olimpia was fortunate enough to have one. Sometimes, though, servants ran to the nearest town fountain with buckets. Water from wells and fountains was used for washing dishes, clothes, and floors, for the periodic bath, and for washing the hands and face in the bedchamber and the hands at the table before each meal.

But water was not generally drunk. Given the stomach-wrenching bacteria that leached into the groundwater from the nearby outhouse and the ever-present animal waste, water was looked upon with great suspicion. Most Italians drank wine, often with just enough alcoholic content to kill the germs, generally about 2 percent. This low alcoholic content was fortunate, given the amount of wine the average Italian drank every day—two liters. Such wine often soured quickly, but even rancid wine had important uses—it was handy in washing down horses and mules and removing grease stains from wool and velvet clothing.

Entering her new home, Olimpia would have gone up the wide staircase to the
piano nobile,
or main floor, which was always above the noise and smell of the ground floor used by servants. And here she would have found a set of rooms that Paolo had newly furnished for her. The rooms were not sumptuous but high and airy.

Olimpia must have viewed her new home and impressive possessions with a sigh of relief and a tremendous sense of satisfaction. For lack of money, she had almost been imprisoned in a convent. By marrying Paolo Nini, she had taken the first step to making sure she would never be poor and powerless again. And the father who had betrayed her would have to acknowledge that she now had more money than he ever would, without his help. Plus, her house was several times the size of his, and she had another one just as big across the street.

The happy couple settled into their new life together. No doubt Olimpia had learned housekeeping skills from her mother, and the Maidalchini family would have employed several servants. Olimpia would now have her own
famiglia,
or domestic staff. Far more than mere servants, these individuals were, in a sense, family members, as their name implies. The master or mistress of a household was expected to bail a troublesome servant out of jail, pay for his medical and burial costs, and help his daughters with dowries. In return servants were

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fiercely—sometimes violently—loyal to their employers, ready to cut down anyone in the street who insulted them.

Olimpia’s kitchen and staff dining room would have been located on the first floor of her palazzo, next to the stables and tradesmen’s entrance. Seventeenth-century servants slept in the nooks and crannies of a house, in the basement next to the wine cellar, in the small rooms next to the kitchen or over the stables, and most commonly, in the attic.

The most important member of Olimpia’s
famiglia
would have been her
maestro di casa,
an exalted butler, who supervised all her other servants. The
maestro di casa
arranged the delivery of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, wine, and firewood from the Nini farms around Viterbo, and drew up contracts with local bakers, butchers, poulterers, fish mongers, and candle makers.

Olimpia and Paolo would have had two or three valets or footmen, who, wearing richly embroidered velvet livery and impressive hats with plumes, escorted them in their carriage whenever they went out, riding on the back of the carriage standing up. When the master or mistress was at home, these valets would welcome visitors and accompany them upstairs to the salon or, if the visitors were unwanted, prevent them from entering by a flurry of apologetic excuses. When not standing sentinel, the footmen took off their expensive liveries and did more menial work such as washing the floors, lighting fires, and replacing candlestick stubs with new candles.

One of the Ninis’ servants would have played the role of master or mistress of the wardrobe, in charge of the purchase, laundering, storage, and repair of their clothing, sheets, tablecloths, and napkins. Only undergarments were washed. The outer garments of wool, silk, satin, and velvet, embroidered with gold and silver thread and edged with fur, would have been ruined by water. These were cleaned with wine, hung out in the courtyard overnight to air, and beaten with brooms to get the dust out.

As a rich landowner’s wife, Olimpia was now in a position to buy gorgeous gowns. All the best velvets, satins, and dyes in Europe came from that portal to the East, Venice. But Olimpia did not much care for the gewgaws of contemporary females. Later in life she would laugh at

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other women for chattering an afternoon away over the merits of a ribbon or the cut of a sleeve. Though she would always love jewels, it was for their financial value. It is likely that as Paolo’s wife she dressed simply but elegantly. She preferred to spend her time on business affairs, not women’s foolishness.

Given Olimpia’s thirst for business, and her husband’s easygoing nature, it is probable that he allowed her to administer his estates. Farm tenants paid their rent in the form of crops, usually between 10 and 50 percent of the harvest of wine, olive oil, grain, livestock, fruit, and vegetables. Rents were due four times a year, regulated by the church calendar.

The first payment was expected on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, which celebrated the day when the angel told the Virgin Mary she would miraculously bear a son. Rent was again due on June 24, the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, who baptized him in the river Jordan. The fall rents were paid on September 29, the Feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, who had waged war in heaven against Lucifer. And the final payment was due on the Feast of the Nativity, that joyous day when Christ was born in Bethle-hem. Olimpia would have made sure the rents were fully paid on time; she would have sold for maximum profit the produce her household didn’t use, and carefully counted the coins.

q

At some point shortly after her marriage, Olimpia would have attended the profession ceremonies of her younger sisters at the Convent of Saint Dominic. After at least one year as a novice living the life of a nun, a girl was permitted to officially take nun’s vows at the age of sixteen.

The profession ceremony was, in a way, much like a marriage ceremony, except a physical groom was absent. He was considered to be present, though unseen—the spirit of Jesus hovering above the altar ready to swoop down and claim the young nuns as his brides. As in a real marriage ceremony, the brides took new names. Ortensia became Sister Orsola, and Vittoria became Sister Margherita Vittoria.

In the profession ceremony, after the prayers and hymns, the bishop took each girl’s right hand and put a ring on her third finger, proclaiming

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loudly, “I marry you to Jesus Christ, Son of the Father Almighty, your protector. Accept therefore this ring of faith as a sign from the Holy Spirit that you are called to be the wife of God.” And in this moment it was believed that the girls’ souls were marked with a spiritual tattoo proclaiming them to belong to God alone. Then the bishop added, “Forget your people, and your father’s home.”
¹
But this injunction was almost never obeyed. Until the end of her life, Olimpia and her family would visit her sisters in the convent parlor, laden with food, wine, and gossip.

The girls stretched themselves out in front of the altar, their lips touching the cold stone floor. A black cloth was thrown over them, and lighted candles were placed at their heads and feet, the same ritual as in contemporary funeral customs. And indeed, to the world these young nuns
were
dead.

In ancient Greek legend, the warrior king Agamemnon sacrificed his adolescent daughter Iphigenia to the gods in return for favorable winds to take his fleet to Troy. Now, shrouded by the black death cloths, lay two baroque Iphigenias, sacrificial virgins to Sforza Maidalchini’s dynastic ambitions.

Watching her sisters marry Jesus and die to the world, Olimpia must have shuddered and thought,
There but for the grace of God go I.

q

Within a few months of her wedding, Olimpia discovered she was pregnant. She sailed through the pregnancy and gave birth to a girl she called Costanza, but Costanza died at only a few months old. The loss of an infant was a frequent occurrence. Only 1 or 2 percent of women died in childbirth, while some 30 percent of children died in the first year of life.

Olimpia was pregnant soon again, and in early 1611 she gave birth to the long-awaited heir to the Nini fortune, Nino Nini, named after his grandfather. Perhaps Olimpia, carefully monitoring the health of her son, was surprised that it was her husband who became sick. Having survived the perils of childhood disease, most early-seventeenth-century men of Paolo’s social status lived to be somewhere between fifty-six and sixty. But at twenty-three, Paolo Nini fell mortally ill. He died on June 6, 1611.

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It is not known what caused Paolo’s death. The plague, which ravaged Italian cities every generation or so, did not strike in 1611. Perhaps it was malaria, an errant mosquito that had flown to Viterbo from the swamps around Rome. Or maybe he caught a cold, which turned into bronchitis and then pneumonia. Paolo might have developed a walloping case of dysentery, which could quickly enervate a young, healthy person, dehydrating him into a parched husk within a week. In seventeenth-century Europe, the most robust individual could go from dancing to dead in a matter of days.

Twenty-year-old Olimpia was now a widow. We have no way of knowing how she felt about losing Paolo. Given the sentiment Olimpia hid beneath her hard crust, it is possible she grieved deeply. Though bereft of her husband, she still had her son, and little Nino was one very wealthy infant, having inherited all of his father’s assets. Olimpia would administer the property for her son until he came of age.