The Pope's Daughter: The Extraordinary Life of Felice Della Rovere by Caroline P. Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

preconceived ideas about herself. Felice felt no stigma from her illegitimacy. She was proud of her parentage because those around her were proud of it on her behalf. Her Savona cousins, however, who might have profited from the Church but whose lives did not revolve around it, probably did not see Felice in the way she saw herself.
    For them, she was simply a family bastard, an insignificant girl at that, who did not merit any special treatment from them. This cool attitude in itself might have surprised her. It is also possible that Felice arrived, not only full of self-confidence, but with a marked sense of superiority too. She was Roman, from the caput mundi , a city that was second to none, while Savona lived in the shadow of its more prosperous neighbour, Genoa. Felice came from a city filled with ancient temples, churches and palaces. During the papacy of Sixtus IV, Savona’s cathedral had been enlarged when he built a sumptuous chapel for his parents. In 1490 , Giuliano della Rovere gave a magnificent altarpiece by Vincenzo Foppa to Savona’s Oratory of Our Lady, featuring the Madonna and Child, and Giuliano himself kneeling as a donor, and the merchants’ houses became adorned with stylish all’antica decoration. 2 The Roman Felice could see it was hardly comparable to the city she had left behind. Undoubtedly she arrived with all the preconceptions city-dwellers have towards places they deem less sophisticated.
    There were plenty of ingredients for conflict between a headstrong and lonely girl and her Savonese relations. They did not even share a first language. The Italian used for written correspondence or spoken between Italians of different towns or provinces was toscana , the language of Tuscany. But even today each province still has its own dialect, spoken exclusively by its natives. At home, Felice would have spoken romanescha , the language of the Romans. Her relatives in Savona spoke a Savonese variant on the Ligurian dialect. This linguistic difference would have served only to widen the gap between them.
    What is important about this turn of events in Felice’s life is how it moulded her attitude towards her family. Her instinct was to trust and turn to those family members who were churchmen. She always had good relations with them, perhaps because she had had good experiences with the clergy in Rome as a child. But secular family members were a different matter. She tended to regard them with suspicion and isolated herself from them. Whatever might be said about there being little difference between legitimate and illegitimate children, the legitimate ones were always prepared to use their status as a trump card. It seems likely that Felice’s provincial relatives, taken aback by the self-possession and self-confidence of a child they viewed as a marginal member of their family, chose to remind her that she was not really one of them. Felice was not one to forget such slights.
    Whether she liked it or not, Savona was to become her home. With Rome out of Giuliano della Rovere’s reach, he turned his attention to shaping Savona into a kingdom for himself. Part of his grand scheme was to encourage the French, his current allies, to invade Italy and take Genoa and Savona, then establishing him as prince in his native land. He spent a good deal of time in France trying to bring this about, but that did not mean he left Savona unattended. In a foreshadowing of his behaviour in the following decade, Giuliano set about creating a residence in Savona fit for its potential new lord. He hired the Florentine architect Giuliano da Sangallo to build him a splendid palace in the style of those occupied by the Medici and their associates in Florence. The Palazzo della Rovere was the largest the city had ever seen, located at the highest point in Savona overlooking the harbour, on a parcel of land bought originally by Sixtus
    IV. The palace, which was more magnificent than surrounding buildings, dominated the