Pietro Bembo to Lucrezia Borgia
    On October 15, 1502, Pietro Bembo, a 32 year old Benetian Poet and one of the most accomplished scholars in Renaissance Italy, came to stay in Ostellato, a village close to the citystate of Ferrara in northern Italy. He was visiting his friend, the poet Ercole Strozzi at the Strozzi family villa. soon after he arrived, another of the poet's friends, the beautiful and cultured Lucrezia borgia visited the villa, and the two were instantly attracted.
    Lucrezia, wife of Alfonso d'Estre, who was heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, was daughter of Pope Alexander VI, of who Machiavelli wrote,

"[he] never thought of anything but deceiving people."
Although she was barely 23, Lucrezia had already played a significant part in the intrigues of the Borgia family, and had been given in marriage three times to cement political alliances. Her father arranged a divorce from her first husband, don Gasparo de Procida, and cancelled her betrothal to Ludovico Sforza, the powerful ruler of Milan. In 1500 her brother Cesare Borgia was suspected by many of having arranged the murder of her second husband, alfonso, prince of Salerno. When she became first lady of Ferrara in 1502, Lucrezia acquired more wealth and a higher social position than ever before. She also had a good deal of freedom. alfonso pursued his interests in military equipment, and left his wife to follow her own enthusiasms--poetry, music, and dancing. She became a prominent patron of the arts, attracting the flattery of poets and scholars from all over Italy.
    This was the circle that Bembo joined in 1502. Tall, blond, and handsome, he was a master of courtly manners and a famous writer. He brought with him to Ostellato an unfinished book, Gl'Asoliani, a dialogue on the nature of love. In addition to these accomplishments, he had perfected the art of writting well-crafted and memorable love letters. Talking with Lucrezia, the conversation turned naturally to the subject of courtly love. Pietro's letter, extracted here, recalls their conversations,

"on the balcony with the moon as witness."
    In 16th-century Italy, a man of letters and a lady of rank, were almost expected to talk and write to each other at a level suspended somewhere between poetry and courtship. Two hundred years before, Francesco Petrarch (1304-74) wrote passionate poems to a woman called Laura, who he saw only once, in church, and probably never spoke to. This et a powerful precedent. Every lady at a Renaissance court became a potential Laura, whom it was a poet's duty to praise from a distance. This ideal of pure and expressive love--always desiring and never satisfied--was delicately, perhaps impossibly balanced. By June 1503 Lucrezia and Bembo were writing regularly, exchanging poems and endearments. Lucrezia cloaked her identity under the initials. f.f. and as added concealment, Pietro sent his letters as if to one of her ladies-in-waiting. They made the relationship an elaborate game, played at arm's length and conducted through expressive letters rather than physical contact. Receiving a lock of her hair in the middle of that summer, Pietro expressed his joy:

"Every day you find some new way to fan my ardor."
    A few months later, in August 1503, Lucrezia's father died. She was grief stricken, refusing to eat and sitting all day in black-draped rooms. Apart from the emotional loss, he had been her chief protector from political maneuvering in her husband's court. Now the Borgia enemies had an opportunity for revenge. Bembo consoled Lucrezia, beset by dangers in an unfriendly court. He wrote,

"though it would be my greatest joy to see you happy in everything always, I affirm and I swear that rather than diminish my ardor, these misfortunes will quicken my desire to serve you."
    In October Bembo had to go back to Venice on family business. It was then that he wrote the letter extracted here. From December 1503 business kept him in Venice more or less permanently, but they continued to correspond. By early 1505 their letters were full of allusions to plots and intrigues threatening Lucrezia's position. realizing that he could do little to protect her, Bembo wrote:

"the day will come when fate will overcome you in spite of our efforts to prevent it. But then it will be sweet to remember that our love was strong and constant, and the memory will make me happy."
Chief among these dangers was the constant fear that Lucrezia's enemies might use Bembo to engineer a rift with her husband. Pietro cautioned her:

"...see that no one observes you writing for I know that you are watched."
After this, apparently, they judged the correspondence to be too risky, and there were no more letters to f.f., only a few formal letters to the duchess of Ferrara. In September 1505 Bembo wrote congratulating the duchess on the birth of a son, and other conventional greetings passed between them in 1513 and 1514. They exchanged their last letters in 1517, two years before Lucrezia died; he expressed regret that he had not been able to see her on a recent visit to the region, and she echoed the sentiment. In fact, there is no evidence that they ever saw each other again.





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin