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Concept
Ferrante Pallavicino
Summary
Ferrante Pallavicino (23 March 1615 – 5 March 1644) was an Italian writer of numerous antisocial and obscene stories and novels with biblical and profane themes, lampoons and satires in Venice which, according to Edward Muir, "were so popular that booksellers and printers bought them from him at a premium." Pallavicino's scandalous satires, which cost him his head at the age of twenty-eight, were all published under pseudonyms or anonymously.
Pallavicino was born in Piacenza, Italy, a member of the old Italian family of the Pallavicini. He received a good education at Padua and elsewhere, and early in life entered the Augustinian order, residing chiefly in Venice. For a year he accompanied the general Ottavio Piccolomini in his German campaigns as field chaplain, and in 1641, shortly after his return, he published a number of clever but exceedingly scurrilous satires on the Roman Curia and on the powerful house of the Barberini, held together by the frame story expressed in its title, Il Corriero svaligiato ("The Post-boy Robbed of his Bag"). In this novella published in 1641, four courtiers read and comment on a post-bag of letters that their noble master has ordered stolen from a courier, which include some political ones written by the Spanish governor of Milan. The basis of his story allowed Pallavicino to express a number of divergent opinions, which included those critical of contemporary rulers in Italy, who included Pope Urban VIII Barberini, "the barber who cut the beard of Christ"; the Jesuits, who were attempting to monopolize all education and intellectual life; the Roman Inquisition, which ruined publishers through its prosecutions; and the Spanish, who at the time occupied parts of Italy. "The only powers to escape condemnation in the letters", according to Muir, "were the valiant republics, Genoa, Lucca, and especially Venice, which had managed to maintain political independence."
The reaction to this work was immediate: the papal nuncio to Venice, Francesco Vitelli, demanded Pallavicino's arrest; although the writer spent six months in prison, his allies kept him from being tried.
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