I am a girl who did no wrong / I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope / I am a rock whose hands have appetites / I am a hunter who cannot kill / I am a mercenary with the French disease / I am a girl who lived among stones / I am a woman who poisoned my enemies / I am a rock and my brothers are rocks / I am a cleric who trafficked in curses / I am a gooseboy or am I a boy / I am a farmer who stole something sacred / I am a monster who let the child go / I am a dog with an unlikely past / I am a hunter who followed the coffin / I am a girl who did something wrong / I am the other side of snow / I am a mirror a mirror am I / Mirror mirror on the wall / Who is the fairest one of all



Do people say that I am both your father and your lover? Let the world, that heap of vermin as ridiculous as they are feeble-minded, believe the most absurd tales about the mighty! You must know that for those destined to dominate others, the ordinary rules of life are turned upside down and duty aquires an entirely new meaning. Good and evil are carried off to a higher, different plane.... Remember this. Walk straight ahead. Do only what you like, as long as it is of some use to you. Leave hesitation and scruples to small minds, to plebeians and subordinates. One consideration alone is worthy of you--the elevation of the House of Borgia, the elevation of yourself. -Alexander VI's speech to Lucrezia Borgia, from Arthur de Gobineau's Scenes historiques de la Renaissance (1877), as quoted in The Borgias by Ican Cloulas (1989)



One day some Lombard masons working near the cloister of Sta. Maria Nuova just off the Via Appia had opened a sarcophagus and found the body of a young Roman woman of about fifteen so well preserved that it seemed alive. A crowd had gathered around and admired the girl's rosy skin, her half-open lips revealing very white teeth, her ears, her black lashes, dark, wide-open eyes, and beautiful hair, done in a knot.... -The Borgia, ibid.

