Person · Aristocrat

The Marchesa

The last of one of the great landowning families near Benevento — ‘laden with jewellery, yellowed with fever’, and smoking a pipe.

In the book

Living in her ruined castle among pigeon droppings — selling pigeons to the hotel, growing vegetables in soil spread on the banqueting-hall floor — she boasts of her family’s feudal oppressions and turns up, unabashed, at Lewis’s supper for the Benevento elite.

Appears in 1 diary entry.

  1. August 15 1944
    A visit to an eccentric, aging Marchesa living amid ruin in her ancestral castle, rumored for scandalous past behavior with local youths.

    last surviving member of a great landowning family near Benevento, living amid ruin and pigeon droppings in her castle

Search Google ↗

Use to move between pages