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Catholic Church had not changed Montalto’s love of hard physical labor, and within a year he had personally turned the overgrown hill into a fragrant, blooming slice of Paradise.
    Perhaps it was a mistake for him to proudly show Vittoria the fruits of his efforts. The moment she saw the beautiful spot she wanted it for herself. Hadn’t her dowry gone to pay for it? Why shouldn’t she have it, and use the sale of olive oil and wine for her maintenance? Though Cardinal Montalto adored his garden, he signed it over to Francesco and Vittoria on October 2, 1577.
    Vittoria’s expenses were increasingly competing with the cardinal’s good works. Montalto’s income was only 8,000 scudi a year – tiny for a cardinal. Out of this he maintained his own household and that of Camilla. He provided houses for poor families in his impoverished hometown of Montalto, where on October 15, 1578, he built a grammar school and hired a teacher on the interest of a 1,370-scudi annuity. On February 19, 1579, he invested in a 2,000-scudi annuity to pay the salary of a doctor to provide free medical care to the community.
    In June 1579, the cardinal provided Valeria, daughter of his dead sister Flora, a dowry of 3,000 scudi, the same amount he had paid for Camilla’s daughter Maria back in 1570 when she had married a Roman gentleman of moderate means. He had also squirreled away another 3,000 scudi for the future marriage of Maria’s daughter, little Flavia. He even gave Camilla’s maidservant, Franceschina, a dowry of 200 scudi. In addition, one of his duties as a cardinal, even a poor one, was to embellish churches; Montalto erected a beautiful marble chapel in Saint Mary Major.
    But Vittoria kept angling for more luxuries. She found it shameful that she didn’t have a coach and peppered the cardinal with requests to buy her one. Roman streets were clogged with several inches of filth – manure from horses, donkeys, and oxen, as well as rotten food and the contents of chamber pots cavalierly tossed out of windows. When forced to walk in the street, Roman noblewomen were careful to avoid soiling the gold-trimmed hems of their velvet gowns. They wore high platform clogs over their velvet slippers. These clogs would squelch down a couple inches into the stinking muck and still leave the skirts unscathed, and the dainty slippers inside as good as new. But it was better not to walk at all, and any woman worth her salt had to have her own coach.
    Coaches had only recently come into fashion. Before that, Romans were carried in sedan chairs in town; for longer voyages they rode on horses or mules. During his visit to Italy, Thomas Coryat was surprised to see riders carrying umbrellas, which would not be used in England until the mid-eighteenth century. These umbrellas, he wrote, “minister shadowe to them for shelter against the scorching heate of the sunne. These are made of leather… They are used especially by horsemen, who carry them in their hands when they ride, fastening the end of the handle upon one of their thighs, and they impart so large a shadow unto them, that it keepeth the heate of the sunne from the upper parts of their bodies.” 1
    It is hard to imagine anyone galloping across a field holding a heavy leather umbrella, but particularly a woman, riding sidesaddle, swathed in long skirts. Perhaps for this reason, on long journeys noblewomen usually traveled in litters – long boxlike structures swinging between the wheels, in which passengers lay down on pillows. But in the early sixteenth century, Hungarians invented a rudimentary spring suspension system for carriages. As long as the roads were good and the trip was short, the new carriages provided a faster and smoother ride. Ideal for city traveling, by the 1570s they had become all the vogue in Rome.
    In 1575, one irate bishop wrote a memorandum recommending that coaches be forbidden on account of the spirit of luxury and extravagance which the new fashion had introduced.