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and dressed according to the canons of that century-old family, by Mons Ursinorum he was transferred to the Curia following the cardinal's nephew.

      Giovan Battista, despite the young man's persistent protests, never gave him any valid explanations for those mysterious misgivings (perhaps he did not know or perhaps was forced to keep silent)… but he constrained himself to fulfilling the task entrusted to him by his uncle, he started immediately by sending the orphan for the best diplomatic training, …having already had the chance to ascertain that the boy was in no way inclined to the mystical and religious life.

      The latter, in the intimacy of the nights, occasionally thought of the words of that first meeting with Cardinal Latino, powerless before the many because they besieged his mind: why could he not or should he not know? Why and by whom was he to be protected? Why would his humble mother have known and confided an arcane secret to an illustrious prelate concerning him? Why was that secret so dangerous to himself and even to the entire Church?

      At other times he thought of the places and people of his childhood but, now definitively entrusted to that new illustrious protector by his only relative in life, he could not miss the chance to try his hand at what he had emphatically heard of from the stories of the Dominican fathers; he therefore concentrated on his studies and soon adapted to Roman ecclesiastical circles, to the sumptuous rooms at the Curia, to the huge monuments, to the majestic palaces, to the lavish banquets…

      … tempora tempore, it was as if that type of life had always been familiar to him. Not a day passed when he did not have new experiences; not a day passed when he did not appropriate new knowledge for his cultural baggage; not a day passed when he did not get to know new people: princes and valets, artists and courtiers, engineers and musicians, heroes and missionaries, parasites and pusillanimous, prelates and prostitutes. A gymnasium of continuous and inexhaustible life…

      Getting to know as many people as possible, from all walks of life, from all backgrounds, from every culture, from every creed, from every lineage, he entered their world, found useful information, analyzed every detail, scrutinized every human soul, … it was also the foundation of his profession. And it apparently led him to be friends with everyone. In reality, of the priceless multitude of men and women he met in his life, the diplomat could count on only a very few and true friends, three he met during those years and each of them guarded an intimate secret:

      Jacopo, a Benedictine monk, fine alchemist, studied botany, concoctions, potions, and perfumes but was also the creator of excellent liqueurs and digestives. With Tristano he shared a passion for the patristic classics and the philosophical search for truth. At a very young age he had killed his teacher with an alembic, an old helpless pedophile who had repeatedly abused his pupils. The corpse, dissolved in acid, was never found.

      Veronica, raised by her mother in a Venetian brothel had, at a very early age, learned the art of seduction that she had practiced in Rome for some years; her house for trysts was frequented daily by painters, men of letters, soldiers, wealthy merchants, bankers, counts, marquises and, above all, high-ranking prelates. She no longer had any family in the world, except for a twin sister who she had never known, whose mysterious existence only Tristano knew about.

      Ludovico, son and assistant to the personal tailor of the Orsini family, extremely refined, creative, extravagant, extroverted, expert in the use of many different fabrics, textiles and accessories, always informed on the news and trends from the Italian and European states. His secret? … he was sexually attracted to men more than women and, although he had never dared to show it, he had an admiration and a particular affection for Tristano, which sometimes transcended the level of friendship.

      As soon as he could, freed of the burdens of the Curia, between one mission and the next, the beardless diplomat happily met with his friends… After each mission, as soon as he returned to Rome, he visited them, to tell them about the adventurous dynamics lived and to bring them a souvenir.

      In the summer of 1477 Cardinal Orsini became seriously ill; he immediately called his protégé who was then at the abbey of Santa Maria di Farfa. Tristano went at lightning speed but when he arrived in Rome the palace was already in mourning. On the main floor, the hall up to the bed was crowded with mourning princes and whispering notables: the high cardinal was inauspiciously dead and with him the possibility of knowing from his voice the arcane mystery that enveloped the young bureaucrat’s past.

      Unfortunately, the cardinal had left nothing that concerned him. Nor did the prelate's will mention the secret he had spoken of three years earlier.

      In the days following his death, Tristano fiercely and meticulously investigated the holy life of Latino, rummaging through the palace library… but nothing, he could not find anything, no relevant clue… except a single page that had been torn from an old travel diary. The document concerned an important mission of Cardinal Orsini to Barletta in AD MCDLIX. The cardinal's manuscripts were almost all written and preserved with such a maniacal perfection that the lack of a sheet, however badly cut, would have been filled and arranged promptly, if not by Latino himself, by his attentive librarians, and for a moment this attracted Tristano's suspicions; unfortunately there was nothing else that could open a trail nor a hypothesis worthy of study. He therefore decided to halt all research and return to the Curia, where he could continue his diplomatic work under the auspices of Giovanni Battista Orsini, who in the meantime had received the highly coveted appointment as apostolic protonotary.

      In his first diplomatic assignments outside the confines of the Papal State, Tristano was joined by the pontifical nuncio Fra Roberto da Lecce, but soon his rare skills of diligence, prudence e discretion convinced Giovanni Battista and his advisers to entrust him with increasingly critical and delicate issues for which he necessarily enjoyed a certain independence and autonomy.

      One of these was within the intricate context of the Ferrara War. Not only were the lords of the peninsula involved, for various reasons and at different levels, but also within the Church state the situation became more complicated each day and required excellent chess masters who were able to play at least two games simultaneously: one external and one, perhaps the more dangerous for the Holy See, internal; in fact two factions had been created in Rome: the Orsini and the Della Rovere, in support of the pope, against the Colonna princes, supported by the Savelli.

      In short, life for our young diplomat was not at all easy: the ally reassuring and full of praise of the previous dinner could well become, overnight, the bitter and deplorable enemy of the next morning, the pawn to be removed from the chessboard to avoid stall or to give room to castling, the piece to be exchanged to launch the final attack…

      Already, after the summer of that 1482, the tone of papal politics had become clear. The Holy See had decided to end the war and Tristano had, therefore, been sent to the Gonzaga court precisely to demonstrate Rome's changed will towards Ferrara and Mantua. At the same time, enjoying the utmost welcome from the proprietors and having free access to the refined rooms the palace, the handsome twenty-two year old certainly could not remain insensitive to the calls of the young courtesans who paraded before him on those cold winter evenings.

      III

       Alessandra Lippi

The meeting with Pietro Di Giovanni and the rest stop in Prato

      At the first glimmer of the Mantuan sun, Tristano, abandoning his very young lover in the arms of Morpheus, had just returned to his room; where he attempted to indulge in well-deserved sleep, when an insistent voice under his window brought him back to reality:

      “Excellence… Excellence… My Lord…”

      A soldier with a small parchment in his hand urgently requested his attention.

      The letter clearly had a papal seal and ordered Tristano to return to Rome as quickly as possible.

      Thus, without even waiting for news from the battlefield, the pontifical officer had to leave the Virgilian city with his escort, but not before quickly penning two necessary messages: one for the Marquis Federico, apologizing for his sudden departure and the confirmations of reassurance for the newfound support of the Holy Father towards him and the Duke of Ferrara; the other for his Beatrice, thanking her for having generously shared that night and wishing her to meet that needy love that

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