Vannozza Cattanei: A Hotel Proprietress in Renaissance Rome

Unlike the majority of sixteenth-century women who worked as silk-weavers, butter-makers, or house servants, Vannozza Cattanei (1452 [?]–1518) was exceptional, as she owned a business in Renaissance Rome, a category of work that, according to Alice Clark in Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, was the least open to women.¹ Thus, Cattanei, better known as the lover or mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), achieved what few women of her time could: she acquired, sold, rented, and administered more than a handful of locande (inns or hotels) in the center of Rome. This essay explores the personal and professional life of Vannozza Cattanei in order to chart her successes as a businesswoman in hotel proprietorship and management, work that allowed her to create a public identity through architecture.²

Cattanei was not the typical “invisible” mistress, a term coined by Helen Ettlinger, for her life, her relationships, and her importance as the mother of the Borgia offspring kept her visible throughout history.³ Historians, art historians, and writers of fiction usually emphasize her roles as the mistress of the powerful Cardinal and as the mother of his children: Juan, Duke of Gandia; the notorious Cesare; Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara; and Joffre. Certainly, Cattanei’s life was scandalous by many standards. While married to one man, she lived and slept with, and bore children to another. Her accumulated wealth was not only based on her husbands’ assets, but on her close relationship to Alexander VI. Cattanei’s role as proprietor of successful locande was dependent on three factors coming together in her favor at the right time: money, opportunity, and location. It was through her marriages and relationship with Alexander VI that Vannozza acquired the needed funds to purchase or rent the buildings that she converted into her hotels.

Although little historical evidence remains that illuminates Cattanei’s early life,⁴ her adult life, during which she married three times and outlived all of her husbands, is quite well documented. She first wed Domenico da Rignano in 1469, most likely at the age of 27, and widowed for the first time in 1474.⁵ Together with Domenico, she purchased a house on the Via del Pellegrino, near Campo dei Fiori, for 500 ducats, of which 310 were from her dowry. Umberto Gnoli believes that this house might have been a gift from Cardinal Borgia as a sort of recompense for Domenico, although he offers no evidence to support this statement.⁶ Cardinal Borgia, while holding the high-ranking office of Vice Cancelliere della Chiesa, an appointment that he received from his uncle, Pope Calixtus III Borgia, built a magnificent palace near the Tiber River,⁷ for many years the locus of the relationship between him and Cattanei. However, Cattanei, and eventually the Borgia children, would have claimed their legal domicile to be the house in which she lived with her husband. In 1474, while married to Domenico, Cattanei bore Borgia a son, Juan; a year later, Cesare Borgia was born. Domenico’s death in 1475 left her a widow for the first time. Although no known documents reveal the wealth she possessed at this time, she certainly owned the house on the Pellegrino and she inherited a house whose present-day address is Via di S. Maria in Monticelli, 5. Demolished in the nineteenth century, it once displayed the Rignano family coat of arms.⁸ While a widow, Cattanei gave birth in 1480 to a third Borgia child, a girl named Lucrezia; she then married again.

Cattanei’s second husband, Giorgio della Croce, was an educated man from Milan. Why she decided to wed Giorgio is not known, but it might have been a legal agreement so that she could publicly continue her living arrangements with the powerful Cardinal Borgia. Giorgio undoubtedly benefitted from the arrangement; he received a papal appointment in the same year as his wedding.⁹ A year later, Cattanei gave birth to a fourth Borgia child, her third son, Joffre. Shortly after Joffre’s birth, Cattanei and the cardinal...