Giulia Farnese was barely into her teenage years when her family sent her to Rome, not merely for an education but to climb into the highest circles of the city’s aristocracy. Born in 1474 in Canino, a town within the Papal States, she came from the noble Farnese family, a house with deep roots in the Church. Her father, Pier Luigi, held multiple titles, and her mother, Giovanna, came from the Caetani family, which had already produced two popes. Giulia was the middle child of five siblings.
Her eldest brother, Angelo, was the heir, while her other brother, Alessandro, had been steered toward a religious career that would later shape her own fate. Her sister Beatrice became a Benedictine nun and eventually rose to abbess of San Bernardino in Viterbo, but it was Giulia whose path would entangle her with the highest authority in Christendom. By 1489, at just fifteen years old, Giulia had successfully integrated into Roman noble society. That year she married Orsino Orsini, the lord of Bassanello.
The marriage was a purely political arrangement. The Orsini family demanded an enormous dowry of 3,000 gold florins, equivalent to roughly half a million dollars today, and contemporaries described Orsino himself as a fool lacking self-confidence. The union offered Giulia status, but not love, and her new family connections would prove far more consequential than her husband. Her mother-in-law, Adriana, was a strong-willed noblewoman, and Adriana’s third cousin was Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, a rising star in the papal court who served as vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church.
Borgia, like many powerful churchmen of the era, ignored his vows of celibacy. At some point, the exact timing unclear, he began an affair with the young Giulia, making her his mistress. In August 1492, that affair became a scandal of historic proportions when Rodrigo Borgia was elected pope, taking the name Alexander VI. Giulia Farnese, still married to Orsino, found herself the mistress of the Holy Father himself.
What made the situation even stranger was that her mother-in-law, Adriana, was fully aware of the relationship and actively approved of it, believing that Giulia’s connection to the pope would elevate her own son’s standing within the Vatican. With Adriana’s blessing, Giulia moved into a newly built palace near the Vatican in November 1493, a residence easily accessible for the pope’s secret visits. She shared the household with two of the most unusual roommates imaginable: her mother-in-law Adriana and Lucrezia Borgia, the pope’s own daughter. Despite being her father’s mistress, Giulia and Lucrezia became close friends.
Far from hiding her relationship, Giulia embraced it boldly, and Alexander clearly felt the same. He respected her not merely for her beauty but for her intelligence, courage, and political instincts, treating her as a trusted confidante whose counsel he valued. The affair brought Giulia immense material wealth. Alexander made her one of the richest and most powerful women in Rome, and she did not hesitate to flaunt it.
More significantly, she used her influence to advance her family. In 1492, she persuaded the pope to elevate her brother Alessandro to the rank of cardinal, a promotion that set him on a path that would ultimately lead to his own papacy. The affair, controversial as it was, dramatically raised the political standing of the Farnese family, and Giulia was the link that connected the powerful Borgia world with her own ambitious clan. As one writer put it, she combined desire and diplomacy, passion and strategy, securing her place in history through that union.
Giulia’s notoriety also left its mark on the art of the period. Historians of art believe that the Virgin Mary in Pietro Vannucci’s famous painting of Pope Alexander VI kneeling before her was modeled on Giulia’s features. But art alone was not enough to cement her ties to the papacy. On November 30, 1492, she gave birth to a daughter named Laura.
Because of the affair, the child’s paternity was unclear, whether her father was Orsino or the pope. Giulia insisted that Alexander was the father, most likely to secure a better future for the girl. Tragedy struck the Farnese family in 1492 when Giulia’s eldest brother, Angelo, fell ill with a sickness from which he never recovered. Giulia rushed to his side at Capodimonte to say her farewells.
The pope, accustomed to having his mistress close at hand, was angered by her sudden absence. His displeasure was so intense that even after Angelo’s death, Giulia’s husband Orsino feared to leave Rome without permission, wary of the pope’s wrath. Giulia’s return to Rome coincided with a French invasion of Italy, and the pope’s mistress found herself caught up in the conflict. She was captured by a French captain named Yves d’Allègre, who demanded a ransom from the pope for her release, which Alexander paid.
The incident seemed to calm her lover’s earlier anger, and their relationship continued for another seven or eight years. But by the turn of the century, Giulia had fallen out of favor. She quietly withdrew from the affair, and the prevailing theory for her loss of standing was a simple one: she was aging. In her mid-thirties, she was considered too old for a man of Alexander’s tastes.
The separation appears to have been amicable, with her trusted mother-in-law Adriana handling the negotiations. Soon after, Giulia found herself suddenly unmarried. Her husband Orsino died young in 1500, and with no remaining ties to Rome, she decided on a change. She moved to Carbognano, a small town not far from the capital, and settled into a quieter life, though she still engaged in politics from time to time.
Between 1500 and 1506, she married again. Her new husband was Giovanni Capece Bozzuto, a Neapolitan nobleman who held the titles of Baron of Aprategola and Lord of Palcerano. The marriage improved Giulia’s position somewhat, but she was about to gain a kind of power rarely held by women of her era. Pope Alexander VI had given the castle of Carbognano, where Giulia resided, to her late husband Orsino, likely in recognition of her services.
In 1506, Giulia became governor of the castle, granting her regional authority that few women of her time enjoyed. Her abilities as a ruler were evident from her earlier role as an informal advisor to the pope. Records from the castle of Carbognano praised her as a competent administrator who governed with firmness and energy, and later officials honored her by permanently inscribing her name on the castle gate. Her second husband, Giovanni, joined her in Carbognano and seems to have been content to let his wife handle the daily work of governance.
After what was likely a comfortable and prosperous life, Giovanni died in the castle in 1517. Widowed once more, Giulia’s behavior suggested the loss devastated her. She remained in Carbognano for a few more years, but her passion for governing seemed to fade, perhaps from grief. In 1522, she packed her belongings and returned to Rome, a move that may have been prompted by a foreboding premonition.
By early 1524, Giulia felt her end was near. On March 14, in her residence overlooking the church of San Girolamo, she wrote her final will. The will included a poignant acknowledgment of her pioneering role. Most women of her time had no economic independence and depended heavily on men, but Giulia had been different, and she made sure to pass on that privilege to the women she loved most.
She bequeathed substantial sums to her housekeeper, her caretaker, her daughter, and even to some poor women of Carbognano, securing their economic well-being. Before her death at about fifty years old on March 23, 1524, she was rumored to have written a love letter addressed to no one in particular, a poetic farewell to the world. Some who claimed to have seen her said she remarked that she had loved two men, two bloodlines, and two destinies, and did not know which had truly been hers.