mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
Christina continued to love Cardinal Decio Azzolini until her death,
though his initial interest in her soon cooled and became platonic. At
the end of her life she declared that she, too, had become an ancient Roman
monument and one of the sights of Rome. Her last wish was to be
buried in the Pantheon, that ancient pagan temple to all the gods. But
when she died in 1689 at the age of sixty-two, she was interred in that
most Catholic of tombs, the papal grottoes below Saint Peter’s Basilica,
as if to force her finally to become a good Catholic.
While Olimpia is somewhat known in Rome, Viterbo, and other places
associated with her, the stories about her are bleared with time and
spiced with sex. In Viterbo it is said that Olimpia was a beautiful woman
who stuck her head out of the window, tantalizing men with her lovely
hair and inviting them to come up to her room. In her castle of Alviano
in Umbria, there is a well in the courtyard. Down the well, it is said, the
black widow Olimpia threw the bodies of the men she had slept with
and murdered.
Wherever Olimpia lived, rumors abound that millions of pieces of
gold are stashed there, somewhere. Olimpia’s castle of Attigliano, included
in her auction purchase of 1654, is now razed except for a few
picturesque walls. There, it is said, in the covered-over dungeons, sits
Olimpia’s gold. And in her Nini town house in Viterbo the gold is
thought to be hidden in the apartment walls. One young resident, Annalisa
Marinetti, remembers as a child in the 1990s tapping on the walls
with her brother to find the hollow space where Olimpia’s treasure was
stored. It’s in there somewhere, her father, now deceased, told the children.
Anyone who visits the glorious Doria Pamphilj Galleries in Rome will
see where the treasure actually went. It was not hidden in walls or dungeons
but bequeathed to Camillo and the princess of Rossano. There, in
their palace on the Corso, the couple started an immense art collection,
which was added to by later generations. There Olimpia’s gold—including
what she had taken from under the pope’s bed—hangs on the wall in
the form of Raphaels, Tintorettos, Brueghels, and Titians.
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