mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
Swishing into a room with her long silken train, smiling and nodding
to the men assembled there, she opened her mouth and they were spellbound.
“Highly gifted by nature and by fortune,” 1 Cardinal Pallavicino
wrote of the princess, who was “furnished with intelligence, grace, and
excellent power of speech.” 2
Clothing styles had changed since Olimpia’s youth. Gone were the
clunky wheel-shaped farthingales sticking out from the waist. Gone were
the enormous platter-sized ruffs, the heavily embroidered and stiffly
bejeweled velvets. By the 1640s women’s fashions had a flowing ease to
them that had not been seen in well over a century. Women gleamed in
shining silk that threatened to slip entirely off the shoulders. Their décolletage
was so low it barely covered the nipples. A puffy undershirt
poked through full elbow-length sleeves sliced open in front and held
loosely together by jeweled pins, as if they had been placed there as an
afterthought.
Hair, too, had completely changed. In Olimpia’s day it had been severely
scraped back from the face, secured over horsehair pads or metal
frames, and loaded with gems. Now it was cut shoulder-length and
curled, swinging and bobbing gently as a lady nodded, with tiny pin
curls framing the face. Large teardrop-shaped pearls were worn in the
hair and ears.
When the princess of Rossano—all bouncing curls, gleaming silks,
and lustrous pearls—swept into Olimpia’s palazzo the day after Innocent’s
election to render her congratulations, the usually loquacious Camillo
appeared to be struck dumb, his mouth agape. Many visitors
chuckled at his mute ecstasy, but little account was taken of it; it was
known, that particular month, that Camillo was in love with a ballerina.
Olimpia Aldobrandini had a most interesting and romantic story.
She was related to Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, reigned 1534–1549)
and was a cousin of the Farnese duke of Parma. She was also the greatgrandniece
of Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini), who had
died in 1605, leaving enormous wealth to his cardinal nephew’s nephew,
Ippolito Aldobrandini. By the time Cardinal Ippolito died in 1638, his
only surviving relative was his niece, Olimpia, a girl of fifteen. Father
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