Posted by Isabella de’ Medici (1542-1576), daughter of Cosimo I, died on 16 July 1576 at the Medici villa of Cerreto Guidi. According to the chronicles she was strangled by her husband Paolo Giordano Orsini to punish her infidelity, although he claimed she had been taken ill. Ever since, it is said that her ghost wanders the villa.
Inside the splendid Medici Villa in the heart of Cerreto Guidi, in Tuscany, it is said that a restless spirit wanders, unable to find peace. Today the building, built in the mid-16th century by Cosimo I de’ Medici, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The same place was where his daughter Isabella de’ Medici met her death.
The tragedy
The tragedy took place on 16 July 1576, at the hands of her husband Paolo Giordano Orsini. Their marriage, in 1558, had been arranged by their two families. Isabella was a beautiful young woman, nicknamed the “Star of the House of Medici” for her beauty and intellect. Paolo Giordano Orsini, on the other hand, was a soldier who loved hunting and beautiful women.
After living in Rome for a few years, Isabella returned to her beloved Tuscany. But her husband kept watching her, sending his cousin Troilo Orsini to follow her. The two fell for each other, and it did not take Paolo Giordano Orsini long to realise what was going on. Although he was a womaniser and unfaithful himself, Paolo Giordano Orsini could not bear his wife’s betrayal and began to plot revenge.
In July 1576, after her father’s death, he approached Isabella and persuaded her to join a hunt in the woods of Cerreto Guidi. Two different versions have emerged of how events unfolded.
According to the first version, on 16 July, after a party, Orsini offered his wife a romantic night, but led her instead to her death: with the help of two accomplices he slipped over her neck the noose of a rope lowered from above, hanging her and so punishing her betrayal.
The second version, the one told by her husband, speaks of a fatal illness that struck her while she was washing her hair.
What is certain is that shortly afterwards Orsini had the husband of his lover Vittoria Accoramboni killed so that he could marry her.
The apparitions of Isabella de’ Medici
In the villa of Cerreto Guidi you can still see the so-called “noose room“. Everyone who has spent time or stayed in it has reported strange and inexplicable phenomena. The ghost of a woman in 16th-century dress, presumably Isabella, wanders the villa like a classic restless White Lady.
In 1953 some inexplicable disappearances of objects, and a sighting of the ghost itself, were brought to light by an American crew who came to investigate. In the mid-1970s a young man stopped in the streets of Cerreto after an accident said he had seen the glowing figure of a girl. She told him her name was Isabella and that she lived in the residence where the wine fair was being held.
Today sightings of Isabella take place in July at Bracciano Castle, the Orsini estate where the couple had stayed before the betrayals that followed.
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