Later in the same year, Isabella, the most beautiful of Cosimo’s daughters, was married to Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano. Her beauty was enhanced by her many talents. She was a good musician; spoke and wrote elegant Italian, Latin, French and Spanish; was a poetess and an _improvisatrice_, and accompanied herself on the lute. Her father doted on her, and opposed her departure for Rome with her husband. The name of the beautiful young Duchess was soon coupled with that of Troilo Orsini, her husband’s cousin, who had been left by him as her guardian. Troilo became jealous of a handsome page, Lelio Torello, whom he stabbed one night in the garden. After the death of Cosimo the scandal reached the ears of Isabella’s husband, who came from Rome, and with the connivance of her brother, the Grand Duke, strangled her at his villa of Cerreto but a few days after her brother, Don Pietro, had killed his lovely young Spanish wife at Cafaggiuolo. The birth of the only son of Francesco I. and of Joan of Austria, supposed to have been poisoned a few years later by Bianca Cappello, was celebrated with great rejoicings; money was showered down among the crowd from the windows of the Palazzo Pitti, and great butts of wine were broached on the balustrade of the Palazzo Vecchio. Not only did every man drink at will, but Settimanni declares that the Via Vachereccia and the Mercato Nuovo ran with wine as far as the Ponte Vecchio. Poor ugly, misshapen Joan had no happy life with her Medici husband, who was completely under the dominion of the handsome and dissolute Bianca Cappello, to whom he was secretly married in his private chapel very soon after his wife’s death. A few months later the Venetian Republic proclaimed Bianca a daughter of Venice, and the marriage was then solemnized with great pomp in the cathedral, while a tournament was held in the courtyard of the palace in her honour.