ing the most devout bride, but also with truly extraordinary
pleasure for the whole people, who, having been deprived of such things
for many years, and part of the fragile apparatus having been lost,
feared that they would never be resumed, there was held the festival, so
famous and so celebrated in olden days, of S. Felice, so-called from the
church where it used formerly to be represented. But this time, besides
that which their Excellencies, our Lords, themselves deigned to do, it
was represented at the pains and expense of four of the principal and
most ingenious gentlemen of the city in the Church of S. Spirito, as a
place more capacious and more beautiful, with a vast apparatus of
machinery and all the old instruments and not a few newly added. In it,
besides many Prophets and Sibyls who, singing in the simple ancient
manner, announced the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, very
notable--nay, marvellous, stupendous, and incomparable, from its having
been contrived in those ignorant ages--was the Paradise, which, opening
in an instant, was seen filled with all the hierarchies of the Angels
and of the Saints both male and female, and with various movements
representing its different spheres, and as it were sending down to earth
the Divine Gabriel shining with infinite splendour, in the midst of
eight other little Angels, to bring the Annunciation to the Glorious
Virgin, who was seen waiting in her chamber, all humble and devout; all
being let down (and reascending afterwards), to the rare marvel of
everyone, from the highest part of the cupola of that church, where the
above-described Paradise was figured, down to the floor of the chamber
of the Virgin, which was not raised any great height from the ground,
and all with such security and by methods so beautiful, so facile, and
so ingenious, that it appeared scarcely possible that the human brain
was able to go so far. And with this the festivities all arranged by our
most excellent Lords for those most royal nuptials had a conclusion not
only renowned and splendid, but also, as was right fitting for true
Christian Princes, religious and devout.

Many things, also, could have been told of a very noble spectacle
presented by the most liberal Signor Paolo Giordano Orsino, Duke of
Bracciano, in a great and most heroic theatre, all suspended in the air,
which was constructed by him of woodwork in those days with royal spirit
and incredible expense; and in it, with very ric