Giulia’s daughter Laura has no certain birthdate or father. Gossip of the day believed her to be the Pope’s child, but she was christened under the name Orsini. Giulia’s husband was well rewarded for the loan of his wife, but he was never as compliant about the arrangement as were Vannozza dei Cattanei’s husbands. Giulia nearly did rejoin Orsino once, after her flight to her family in Capodimonte to attend her brother’s deathbed, but the Pope’s furious letters (quoted in the book) soon sapped Orsino’s resolve to reclaim his wife. All the delay caused Giulia and her traveling party to fall into the hands of the invading French army—and the French salivated at the power they had gained over the frantic Pope.

Carmelina is a fictional character. Most of the professional cooks in illustrious houses would have been male, but cooks of the day were trained without the strict oversight of a formal guild—a cook’s daughter with talent might well have trained under her father. The Renaissance was a golden age for food as well as art; the recipes from this book have been taken almost exclusively from surviving Renaissance cookbooks. There was a convent of Santa Marta in Venice that boasted the reliquary hand of Santa Marta, the patron saint of cooks—but we have no record that the relic was ever stolen. Desecration of a church or altar was one of the more severe crimes of the day, punishable by such tortures as throttling, upside-down hanging, or the chopping of hands and ears. But justice in the Renaissance was always an arbitrary thing, punishments being handed out according to the social status or financial contributions of the offender.

Leonello is also a fictional character. Dwarves were hugely popular among Renaissance nobles as entertainers, jugglers, and companions; they were even bred like pets. Conversely they could be feared and abhorred by the ignorant as demons, changelings, or simply as cursed by God.