walking a few paces ahead of him, twenty-three-year-old Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily, draped in a gold and crimson robe and bearing a scepter and orb. The queen’s lovely blond head was protected from the pale winter light by a brilliantly colored canopy held aloft by nobles of the highest rank. The crowd was rapturous. “Her figure,” says one admirer, was “. . . tall and nobly formed, her air composed and majestic, her carriage altogether royal, [and] her features of exquisite beauty.”
