Book Description
In January 1698, Romans crowded a city church to view two brutally murdered elderly people and their dying 18-year-old daughter, Pompilia. What followed was the most celebrated trial of its time. The defense argued that Pompilia was an adulteress, husband deserter, and mother of an illegitimate son, grounds for which a husband could rightfully murder, but five men, including Pompilia's elderly husband, were convicted. Using comtemporary sources, Parker questions whether she was a saint or sinner.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Rome, 2 January 1698 The bodies lay side by side on the black and white marble floor before the altar, below Guido Reni's painting of the crucifixion -- the man, 69-year-old Pietro Comparini, on the left, his wife Violante, three years his junior, beside him. Early in the morning they had been carried through the chill air, still clad in bloodstained night-clothes, from their house in the Via Vittoria ... It was said that the Comparini's daughter, Pompilia, only seventeen years old, had been found still alive near the bodies of her parents, and now lay dying in the care of the Augustinian Brothers. Everyone knew that she had recently fled from the house of her husband, Count Guido Franceschini, in Arezzo, and that when he had come to Rome to fetch her back there had been a scandal -- her parents had announced that she was illegitimate, and the husband had branded her an adulteress ...