Felice della Rovere was the illegitimate daughter of Pope Julius II and one of the most remarkable women of the Italian Renaissance. The legend of her throwing herself off a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean to protect her father comes to us from history. She was widowed when she was young (although there’s no evidence that she murdered her first husband; I made that up based on what I know of her character, circumstances, and times) and later married into the infamous Orsini family. Felice is a fascinating woman, I couldn’t include every fabulous detail about her life in this novel, and I highly recommend checking out the bibliography below to read more about her.

Margherita Luti, “the baker’s daughter,” is famously the love of Raphael’s life and subject of many of his most beloved paintings, including the Sistine Madonna. There’s debate over whether Raphael married Margherita in secret (there’s too much evidence to recount here). In 1514, Raphael got engaged to Maria Bibbiena— niece of Cardinal Bibbiena—but he kept postponing the marriage (some researchers see this as evidence that he was not in a position to follow through because he was already married). As basis for Margherita saving Raphael from a pack of wolves, I used a legend that surrounds his Madonna della Seggiola tondo: the woman in the painting supposedly saved a monk from a pack of wolves; in return for her help, the monk blessed her—and the tree he’d hidden in—promising that they would both be famous; according to the legend, Raphael’s tondo (made out of wood from that tree) is the fruition of that blessing.

Agostino Chigi, one of the wealthiest bankers in Rome, commissioned some of Raphael’s greatest works in his villa—including his Triumph of Galatea. (There is also a legend that Michelangelo, too, left a painting on the walls of Chigi villa, while waiting around for a meeting with Raphael; I badly wanted to include this legend, but it never fit in the story. If you visit the villa, see if you can pick out the painting supposedly by Michelangelo: it’s the black-and-white fresco of a man’s head in the Galatea loggia.) Chigi also really did host a large Carnevale party in 1510, was the lover of Imperia (a famous Roman prostitute; we do know her last name—Cognati), and once famously threw his dishes into the Tiber only to have his servants later fish them back out with nets.