While the D'Estes have been probably better known, historians declare that the women of the House of Gonzaga reached the highest excellence in this Renaissance period of feminine education. Everywhere, however, woman received the opportunity for whatever education she desired. Down in Naples the old Greek traditions had survived, and when the disturbance of the Grecian Empire by the Turks brought about a reawakening of Greek culture in the south of Italy, the women shared it as well as the men. At the Court of Joanna or Giovanna, whose career is of special interest as an anticipation of the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots, many of the women reached high intellectual distinction. It is to these lofty Neapolitan educational influences that we owe the intellectual development of Vittoria Colonna. Everywhere, however, the same story might be told. At Rome, at Florence, at Verona, at Padua, even at Forli and Ravenna and Rimini, as well as at Genoa, though Genoa was so much more intent on making money than developing its culture, the women took excellent advantage of the opportunities for learning, often proved to be more successful in their studies than their brothers, and though they did not accomplish much that was to endure in the intellectual life, they seem to have been thoroughly respected by their contemporaries and looked up to as cultured, scholarly personalities. In his "Heroines of Genoa and the Rivieras," Edgcumbe Staley [Footnote 27] has said something of the productivity of the literary women even of Genoa during this period. Genoa was known as probably more interested in mere luxury and less interested in the intellectual life for its own sake than any of the cities of Italy with which we are familiar. The Genoese were the merchant princes whose wives and children, like our own, were much more occupied with the display of their wealth than in the development of a taste for art and letters and the cultivation of a true critical faculty. I have already mentioned some of the products of the Genoese intellectual life among women, however, and this will add to the impression that I think is so true that in proportion to the population there were just as many women interested in education and in {321} literature, women writers and poets in that time as there are in our own. Mr. Staley said: [Footnote 27: Scribner & Sons, New York.] "Among the glittering bevies of intellectual and virtuous damsels, who delighted in the beauties and revelled in the romances of the Villetta di Negro and similar pleasures, were such _gentildonne_ as Peretta Scarpa-Negrone and Livia Spinola, who wrote poems of the heart and the home; Benedetta--Livia's sister--and Caterina Gastadenghi--she sang and played the folk songs of Liguria; Leonora Cibo and Pellegrina Lescara, sweet translators of the 'Aeneid' of Virgil and the 'Odes' of Horace."