On the 15th of October Christina and her suite left Pavia, and started on their long-deferred journey to Flanders. When she first set foot in Italy as a bride, three and a half years before, the Lombard plains were in the first flush of spring, roses and myrtles were breaking into bloom, and the flowers sprang up under her feet. Now the autumn rains fell in such torrents that Cardinal Caracciolo was seriously alarmed, and wrote to Benedetto da Corte and Monsignore di Corea, asking if it might not be well to delay their departure. The first idea had been to go from Pavia to Cremona in a single day, but the bad roads and swollen rivers increased the difficulties of travel, and the Cardinal wrote to implore Messer Benedetto and Corea not to undertake such long journeys, lest the Duchess should be overtired. So the party only rode as far as Codogno, the castle of Count Gaspare Trivulzio, where he and his beautiful wife, Deianira, received them joyfully, and entertained them "as magnificently as if they had been invited to a wedding." Christina's lady-in-waiting, the Princess of Macedonia, rejoiced to be under her daughter's roof, and Benedetto da Corte wrote to tell the Cardinal that nothing could exceed the splendour and hospitality of Count Gaspare's reception. On the 18th the travellers rode along the plains flooded by the swollen Po till they reached Cremona, the dower city of Bianca Visconti, where she had been married to the great Condottiere Francesco Sforza, and which had clung with unswerving loyalty to the fortunes of his house. Here the Castellan came out to meet the Duchess, at the head of the chief citizens, and escorted her to the Castello under the shadow of the famous Torrazza, where she and all her suite found the best of cheer. The next morning the travellers resumed their way, and crossed the rushing Oglio, under the castle of the Gonzagas of Bozzolo, and rode along the green meadows by Castiglione's country home, where his aged mother was still living. The great courtier's name was familiar to all Charles V.'s servants, and Montmorency, who had known him in Spain, may have paused to look at the fair sepulchral chapel which Giulio Romano had lately reared in the pilgrimage church of S. Maria delle Grazie. At Mantua another splendid welcome awaited Christina. The Gonzaga Princes never forgot their close relationship to the Sforzas, and while the reigning Duchess welcomed the Princess of Macedonia as a kinswoman, the old Marchesana, Isabella, rejoiced to embrace her nephew's wife, and looked with affection on this youthful Duchess who bore the same title as her long-lost Beatrice. The next morning Benedetto da Corte sent the Cardinal a glowing account of their journey, which, in spite of the weather, had been one triumphal progress: "REVERENDISSIMO,