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carefully saving used candle stubs to melt together into new candles, and scraping ashes from the hearth to be used for making soap, Vittoria went shopping.
    She quickly ran up enormous debts. Most of the Italian Renaissance economy was based on debt. Hard cash was a rarity, so even a loaf of bread was often paid for with a promise. Most of the carriages of Rome’s great nobles had been bought on credit, as well as their velvet clothes bedecked with pearls and rubies. Butchers and bakers who provided sumptuous banquets at the palaces of the rich might remain unpaid for years. Debt was nothing to be ashamed of; indeed, many debtors prided themselves on their long lists of creditors – proof on paper that their honorable names alone guaranteed easy credit.
    Small infusions of cash were enough to keep the creditors from bringing in the bailiff. These sums were easily obtained by pawning household goods. According to family account books in Italian archives, some valuable items were pawned twenty times or more over the life of their owners to meet pressing debts. As it was, most Italians who made wills furnished their heirs with a long list of creditors, some of them going back decades, who needed to be paid promptly so that the deceased would find no obstacles barring his path to heaven.
    Bartering was also common, and a cash-deprived nobleman who brought in barrels of wine and olive oil from his country estate at harvest time might pay his butcher or baker with those. But not just items of value were bartered. We have difficulty today imagining going into a bar and paying for a glass of wine with a pair of dirty socks or a stained napkin, but such was Rome in the sixteenth century.
    Sometimes creditors accepted favors in lieu of payments. If Vittoria could convince her cardinal uncle to obtain a Vatican position for her dressmaker’s son, it was likely the dressmaker’s invoice would magically disappear. Or her brother serving in the duke of Savoy’s army might welcome as his aide the promising younger brother of her jeweler. But in the end Vittoria’s retail desires were greater than any favors she could provide.

Chapter 3
    Greed
    He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house,
but he who hateth gifts shall live.
    – Proverbs 15:27
    E asy as it was to rack up debt in such a freewheeling economy, Vittoria bought gowns, and jewels, and dainty pieces of furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl for her bedroom, and heady perfumes, and ostrich-feather fans, and gauzy headdresses embroidered with pearls. And when the tangled web of debts became too much and she needed bits of cash to keep her creditors at bay, she thought of her dowry.
    According to custom, a bride’s dowry was legally hers and would be returned to her if her husband died or if he beat her to a pulp and she separated from him. But the groom’s family had the right to invest the dowry as they saw fit, as long as the bride was given a monthly allowance from the investment.
    When Vittoria’s father paid out the last quarterly installment of her dowry on May 24, 1576, Cardinal Montalto used the 1,250 scudi to buy land near his favorite church, Saint Mary Major, which he put in Camilla’s name. This was the breeziest, highest point in Rome, some 250 feet above sea level, adorned with the towering stone ruins of the fourth-century B.C. Servian Walls. Here, 1,500 years earlier, the beautiful noblewoman Lollia Paolina had walked in her gardens as she contemplated snatching Emperor Claudius from the snares of her competitor, Agrippina. But Agrippina won the battle and as empress forced Lollia Paolina to commit suicide.
    Fortunately, Cardinal Montalto’s contemplations on the same hill were far more edifying. He was studying the life of Saint Ambrose, whose biography he was writing. But he was also busy creating a garden and vineyard – digging holes, spreading manure, and carrying buckets of precious water to help the green things grow. Becoming a prince of the