O-FORTI

_After an engraving by Vittorio Campanele_]

Mediaeval Italy has in its time boasted many beautiful women, but there
is one who must take her place before them all, one whose name is a
byword to this day in every corner of that sun-washed country--Bianca di
Pianno-Forti. One shudders at that name--so radiant was she, and yet so
incredibly evil. Her tragic death somehow seems a fitting ending to a
life such as hers--a life so without mercy, so without pity, and yet so
amazingly vivid that it seems to be emblazoned on Italy's very heart.

She first saw the light in Florence. Her father, Allegro, of the
celebrated house of Andante Caprioso, married at the age of fourteen
Giulia Presto, of Verona, at the age of nine. At the birth of Bianca her
mother died, leaving her to the care of her broken-hearted father and
brother Pizzicato (destined later on to make the world ring with his
music). Perhaps the only thing to be said in excuse of Bianca's later
conduct is the fact that she never knew a mother's love. The nuns at the
convent wherein she spent her ripening childhood were kind; but, alas!
they were not mothers--at least, not all of them. Bianca left the
convent when she was sixteen. Slim, lissom, sinuous, with those
arresting eyes that seemed, so Fibinio tells us, to search out the very
souls of all who came near her. Her first love affair occured about a
week after her arrival in her home in Florence. She was in the habit of
walking to mass at the cathedral with her maid Vivace. One morning, so
Poliolioli relates, a handsome soldier stepped out of the shadows of an
adjoining buttress and looked at her. Bianca at once swooned. The same
thing happened again--and again--and yet again. One night she heard the
shutters of her bedchamber rattle! "Who is there?" she cried, yet not
too loudly, because her woman's instinct warned her to be wary. The
shutters were flung open, and the young soldier stepped flamboyantly
into the room. "I am here, _cara, cara mia_!" he cried. "I, Vibrato
Adagio!" With a sibilant cry she fell into his out-stretched arms.
"_Mio, mio,_" she echoed in ecstasy, "I am yours and you are mine!" So
lightly was the first stepping-stone passed on her reckless path of
immorality and vice. Her fickle heart soon tired of the debonair
Vibrato, and in a fit of satiated pique she had his ears cut off and his
tongue removed and tied to his big toe. Thus was her ever-increasing
lust for bloodshed apparent e