"Almost no trace of Cesare remains in Italy. In Rome the serene beauty of Raphael’s frescoes has effaced his memory in the Vatican apartments where he lived; the rooms which once echoed to the Borgias’ laughter are now filled with tourists staring reverently at the walls. In the Romagna, the Rubicon which was of such symbolic importance to him still trickles, an insignificant stream with an overpoweringly evocative name, between Cesena and Rimini, and the Rocca of Forli, his last stronghold, still bears his half-effaced arms - the Borgia bull, the lilies of France and the batons of Captain General of the Church - but otherwise his dominion of the Romagna has fulfilled the nun of Mantua’s prediction that it would be ‘as a straw fire’. White turkeys gobble peacefully in the precincts of Cesare’s citadel of Cesena, where once he held Caterina Sforza prisoner; Caterina’s arms, not his, decorate the interior of the fortress of Imola, although one building there is traditionally held to have been designed by Leonardo da Vinci, and if so must have been executed during his time in Cesare’s service. At Sinigallia, the scene of one of his greatest coups, a shabby square before the citadel bears the name ‘Piazza del Duca’, but that is all. Italy is a land overcrowded with the ghosts of history; only the memories of the men who built great monuments remain alive. Cesare, in his brief, frenzied years of power, had no time for immortality, and the terrible Valentino has faded into the rich tapestry of the past as if he had never been." — from Cesare Borgia: His Life and Times by Sarah Bradford (via vega-ofthe-lyre)

(via vega-ofthe-lyre)



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    This makes me really sad :( When we go to Rome, I wanted to see things assosciated with the Borgias, I guess I still can...
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let the less-loving one be me


isabel. 20. machine woman problems. en passant
ASK & SUBMIT & INTRO & LJ

queens and huntsmen, physicality stanning, theater feelings, hilarious myopia, nonstop verbosity, delusions of grandeur. fictional moral compass not found.

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