Italy is the chessboard on which the Borgias play their difficult political game, and Lucrezia finds herself to be a pawn in their unscrupulous alliances: imposed as wife to Giovanni Sforza, Count of Pesaro, to Alfonso d'Aragona Duke of Bisceglie, and finally maneuvered by Pope Alexander VI and his brother Cesare, she lands in Ferrara at only 22 years of age, already in her third marriage to Alfonso d'Este.

Lucrezia Borgia is surrounded by an aura of slander derived from her family's dubious reputation, so much so that over the centuries she is turned into a ...