LUCREZIA BORGIA

Lucrezia Borgia is the most wretched figure among women in modern history.

"Is she such because she was the most guilty? That is, does it only fall to her to bear the burden of execration that the world by mistake inflicted on her?"

This is the question Ferdinand Gregorovius poses at the beginning of his monograph on Lucretia (1480-1519). Victor Hugo depicted her as a moral monster and as such spread her image in the theaters of Europe. Geneviève Chastenet, on the contrary, almost made her a heroine victimized at most by circumstances and the execrable family in which she had come into the world.

Princess of Salerno, Governor of the Duchy of Spoleto, Regent of the Church State, Regent of the Duchy of Ferrara, Lucrezia is one of the most controversial and most fascinating women of the Italian and European Renaissance. A fictional life in itself, goes together to a gallery of grandiose characters: from her father Pope Alexander VI to her brother Cesare Duke of Valentinois (the Valentine) transfigured into Niccolò Machiavelli's Prince.

Sexual excesses, crimes, civil and ecclesiastical arbìtrations, jolt to life a society that was changing the world and its representation.