Storia di Clelia Farnese: Amori, potere, violenza nella Roma della Controriforma by Gigliola Fragnito (review)

Gigliola Fragnito has produced a work sure to receive vociferous praise from her peers. Benedetta Craveri in the October 21, 2013, La Repubblica and Paolo Mieli in the September 3, 2013, Corriere della Sera raved about Fragnito’s work taking massive archival information and finding the narrative rhythm necessary to delight readers enamored of history. Her sixteen brief chapters constituted, for them, an extraordinary book about a woman caught in power plays at the pinnacle of a still-corrupted Roman noble and ecclesiastical world, years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent.

The story, as told by Fragnito, would make a great motion picture. With political machinations, discomfiting violence, intricate diplomacy, and sexual subplots—not to mention a female protagonist of extraordinary beauty—the tale, which is ultimately a genuine tragedy, has everything necessary to bring people to the theaters. Clelia Farnese (1557–1613) was the daughter of a famous art-patron cardinal and aspiring pope: il gran cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89). The grandson of Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49), he hoped to be the second Farnese to hold the throne in the sixteenth century and repeatedly tried to use his daughter to help him attain the goal. He placed her into a first, disastrous marriage (February 1571) with Giovan Giorgio Cesarini, from a family that had three members in the College of Cardinals at the time. Giovan Giorgio turned out to be an adventurer on many levels: as a soldier, as a gambler, and as an adulterer. Clelia apparently arranged for the killing of one of his paramours inside the Cesarini household. This notoriety threatened the reputation of both noble families. Roman fascination with Clelia’s beauty reached a crescendo as Giovan Giorgio’s health was declining. So, when he died in 1585 at age thirty-five, Clelia’s father aimed to remove the stunning widow with her young son from the city and from the Roman, papal-electing eye. She resisted with all her might, despite even imprisonment at the order of her father. In 1587 he steered her—quite in violation of Tridentine marriage legislation—into a still more disastrous marriage, as Clelia’s new husband, Marco Pio di Savoy, brutalized her. After his death in battle in 1599, Clelia fled to a monastery in the Farnese duchy of Parma. She returned to Rome in 1601 and died there.

Alas, this is a movie highly unlikely to be made in Hollywood. Although sex, violence, and political intrigue all sell well with audiences, producers of films with historical content seem convinced that nothing sells like received narratives of the past. “Bio-pics” of early-modern characters like Martin Luther and Elizabeth I provide plenty of evidence. This book rightly casts aside the standard narrative on life in early-modern Europe. Conjugal and family relations surely did not constrain Clelia, as she defended her own position and the interests of her son with autonomy and determination. This illegitimate daughter unabashedly resisted her father, who happened to be one of the most powerful cardinals in the Roman hierarchy. Clearly not all women conformed to social conventions, often considered determining in early-modern gender relations. Clearly the heavy hand of the post-Tridentine Roman Church was not as heavy as suggested in the dominant narrative. Such truths make for a complicated story to bring to the cinema. Most readers of this journal would be satisfied with easier dissemination of Fragnito’s brilliant work: a readily available English translation.