Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)’s Reviews > Celebrated Crimes > Status Update

Am now in the "Massacres in the South" section and having the hardest time running down any of the people mentioned in wikipedia. For instance, googling Guillaume Moget brings up links to Dumas and this book - not helpful. At least Nines exists...

Meanwhile a lot of Romans felt that Beatrice (Cenci) had been given a hard life due to how her father treated her (the incest was apparently common knowledge?! ugh) - though the Pope wants her and co-conspirators killed by dragging by wild horses. Pope is indignant that people are pleading for mercy.

(Ex. of torture)"...tied her hands behind her back, fastened them to a rope passed over a pulley bolted into the ceiling ...we had her hoisted in the air by the wrists to the height of about two feet from the ground, while we recited a Pater Noster; and then again questioned her as to the facts and circumstances of the aforesaid parricide..."My God! I am dead! You are killing me!" - that pretty well sums it up.

When last I left this one (it's 8 volumes in one book, I'd finished vol. 1) Beatrice was being tortured. Let's see if that's going to last much longer... (I was last reading this at jury duty, and it was not the place to fidget over and make faces at my kindle.)

And after a grim description of the torture of poor Beatrice, Franceso's daughter, setting this aside - while I'm at jury duty anyway. Was way too grim/gross to read and be able to sit still. (I'm kind of a wimp in reading that sort of thing, if its too detailed.)

So no one should be surprised that various family members murder Francesco. Its annoying - after all that Francesco got away with - that his killers are caught.

Francesco invites his 13 yr old daughter Beatrice to an orgy. And has her share the same bed with her stepmother (whom she'd rarely seen before). And convinces her that saints were offspring of fathers and daughters - since she's been secluded all her life she has no idea what reality is. Stepmother threatened with death if she tells daughter there's anything wrong with this.

Francesco Cenci is current villain, who was apparently good at bribing himself out of jail when charged with "abominable crimes" - still haven't gotten to what the crimes are...

"Crimes for the moment disappeared, to give place to vices; but to charming vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged in by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus." - and this sort of 'go research me' sentences are another thing that makes for slow reading progress.

Working my way on start of next volume. There are 8 volumes in one book - so I'm going to be reading this a loooong time...