The Villa Montalto was eventually finished by the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Montalto II, and later on it was known as the Villa Negroni. Engravings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show that it contained an endless variety of fountains; among them Fontana’s great fish-pond was truly magnificent. All of these had been made possible by the Acqua Felice. Sixtus V preferred the Quirinal to any other residence. Perhaps the Villa Montalto may have become distasteful to him by reason of the crime which was immortalized by Webster’s tragedy of “Vittoria Accoramboni or the White Devil.” Cinque Cento Italy was the Italy of the Elizabethan dramatists, and in this tragedy, the blackest of their Italian productions, many of the chief characters were drawn from actual life. The Cardinal Monticelso of the written tragedy had been the actual Cardinal Montalto, and Vittoria Accoramboni and her husband had been his nephew and his nephew’s wife. Francesco Peretti was the cardinal’s favorite nephew, and the ever-perplexing question of the formation of a cardinal’s household had been solved for Montalto by domiciling Francesco and Vittoria in the Villa Montalto. Vittoria had great beauty, and her ambition and audacity were boundless. She aspired to something higher than the handsome nephew of a parsimonious and conspicuously infirm old cardinal. She captivated the head of the Orsini, the Duke of Bracciano, and gave him to understand that she would marry him after he had made away with his wife and her husband. The Duchess of Bracciano was the sister of the powerful Grand Duke of Tuscany. Nevertheless, Bracciano strangled her with his own hands while pretending to kiss her. Young Peretti was then called away from the Villa Montalto one night on the pretext that his dearest friend had need of him, decoyed into the desolate spaces on Monte Cavallo, and stabbed to death. The cardinal, his uncle, buried him without a cry either for justice or vengeance. He waited. But Gregory XIII forbade forever the union of Vittoria and the duke. More the Pope could hardly dare do against the greatest of his subjects. Vittoria and Bracciano went through a mock ceremony and retired to the duke’s great fortress castle of Bracciano, not far from Rome, where they waited for the Pope’s death. When this occurred, they returned to the city in order to have the marriage performed during that interim which must elapse between the death of one pope and the election of another. Vittoria became the legal Duchess of Bracciano; but her former husband’s uncle, the feeble old Cardinal Montalto, was elected Pope, and the two great criminals fled from a certain and terrible retribution. Venice at that time was the refuge for all the terror-stricken, and the duke’s kinsman, Ludovico Orsini, lived there as a successful general. Bracciano died there seven months later; and six weeks afterward Ludovico Orsini murdered both Vittoria and her