mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Acknowledgments
tress of Guardea owned by Olimpia. Nazario Sauro Santi, the mayor of
Alviano, took me on a tour of Olimpia’s jewel of a town. Roberta Proietti
shared with me her thesis on Olimpia’s feud of Attigliano.
Annalisa Marinetti and Paola Bonifazzi, who live in apartments in
Olimpia’s Viterban palaces, were kind enough to invite me in for coffee
and permit me to poke around the gardens, former stables, and nooks
and crannies of their beguiling buildings.
A surprising collection of Vatican letters and diplomatic dispatches
from the pontificate of Innocent X has landed at the Folger Shakespeare
Library in Washington, D.C. My heartfelt thanks go to the staff
for their courtesy and assistance. Also stateside, Dr. Ken Gage of the
Centers for Disease Control—known to his friends as “Dr. Plague”—
kindly answered my questions about the bubonic plague that swept
across Italy in 1656.
There are six biographies of Olimpia, all in Italian, and I am greatly
indebted to their authors. Gregorio Leti wrote the first one in 1666. Ignazio
Ciampi, relying heavily on Vatican archives, published his version
in 1878. The twentieth century saw four more biographies, by Gustavo
Brigante Colonna, Giuseppe Ciaffei, Donata Chiomenti Vassalli, and
Alf io Cavoli. The research of these other biographers has been invaluable
for this project.
Closer to home, I am grateful to Joseph John Jablonski, Jr., Esq., of
Arlington, Virginia, for his help with certain Latin passages in Teodoro
Amayden’s 1655 Elogia, a description of Vatican personalities. And I am
greatly indebted to Dr. Adi Shmueli, the renowned psychologist from
Washington, D.C., for his insights, which helped bring to life a woman
who has been dead for 350 years.
Finally, my thanks to my patient husband, Michael Dyment, and my
encouraging sister, Christine Merrill, who have listened to my ceaseless
Olimpia stories for three years.
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