Hauntings | Page 4

having had a cousin who was a Cardinal's
train-bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four
candles made of dead men's fat, and perform certain rites about which
he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights,
summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning
numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have

previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias.
The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men's fat for the candles,
and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish.
"If it were not for that," says Sor Asdrubale, "the Government would
have had to suppress the lottery ages ago--eh!"
Sept. 9th.--This history of Urbania is not without its romance, although
that romance (as usual) has been overlooked by our Dryasdusts. Even
before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of a woman,
which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio's and Padre de
Sanctis' histories of this place. This woman is Medea, daughter of
Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first of Pierluigi Orsini,
Duke of Stimigliano, and subsequently of Guidalfonso II., Duke of
Urbania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II.
This woman's history and character remind one of that of Bianca
Cappello, and at the same time of Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, she
was affianced at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of the
Rimini family. This family having greatly gone down in the world, her
engagement was broken, and she was betrothed a year later to a
member of the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at the age of
fourteen. But this match not satisfying her own or her father's ambition,
the marriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the
suit encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Umbrian feudatory
of the Orsini family. But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico,
refused to submit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and tried to carry
off by force his bride, with whom he was madly in love, as the lady
was most lovely and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an old
anonymous chronicle. Pico waylaid her litter as she was going to a villa
of her father's, and carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where he
respectfully pressed his suit; insisting that he had a right to consider her
as his wife. But the lady escaped by letting herself into the moat by a
rope of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discovered stabbed in the
chest, by the hand of Madonna Medea da Carpi. He was a handsome
youth only eighteen years old.
The Pico having been settled, and the marriage with him declared null

by the Pope, Medea da Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke of
Stimigliano, and went to live upon his domains near Rome.
Two years later, Pierluigi Orsini was stabbed by one of his grooms at
his castle of Stimigliano, near Orvieto; and suspicion fell upon his
widow, more especially as, immediately after the event, she caused the
murderer to be cut down by two servants in her own chamber; but not
before he had declared that she had induced him to assassinate his
master by a promise of her love. Things became so hot for Medea da
Carpi that she fled to Urbania and threw herself at the feet of Duke
Guidalfonso II., declaring that she had caused the groom to be killed
merely to avenge her good fame, which he had slandered, and that she
was absolutely guiltless of the death of her husband. The marvelous
beauty of the widowed Duchess of Stimigliano, who was only nineteen,
entirely turned the head of the Duke of Urbania. He affected implicit
belief in her innocence, refused to give her up to the Orsinis, kinsmen
of her late husband, and assigned to her magnificent apartments in the
left wing of the palace, among which the room containing the famous
fireplace ornamented with marble Cupids on a blue ground.
Guidalfonso fell madly in love with his beautiful guest. Hitherto timid
and domestic in character, he began publicly to neglect his wife,
Maddalena Varano of Camerino, with whom, although childless, he
had hitherto lived on excellent terms; he not only treated with contempt
the admonitions of his advisers and of his suzerain the Pope, but went
so far as to take measures to repudiate his wife, on the score of quite
imaginary ill-conduct. The Duchess Maddalena, unable to bear this
treatment, fled to the convent of the barefooted sisters at Pesaro, where
she pined away, while Medea da Carpi reigned in her place at Urbania,
embroiling Duke Guidalfonso in quarrels both with the