#cynthia stollhans

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“Unlike the majority of sixteenth-century women who worked as silk-weavers, butter-makers, or house servants, Vannozza Cattanei (1452 [?]���1518) was exceptional, as she owned a business in Renaissance Rome, a category of work that, according to Alice Clark in Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, was the least open to women. Thus, Cattanei, better known as the lover or mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), achieved what few women of her time could: she acquired, sold, rented, and administered more than a handful of locande (inns or hotels) in the center of Rome. This essay explores the personal and professional life of Vannozza Cattanei in order to chart her successes as a businesswoman in hotel proprietorship and management, work that allowed her to create a public identity through architecture.

Cattanei was not the typical “invisible” mistress, a term coined by Helen Ettlinger, for her life, her relationships, and her importance as the mother of the Borgia offspring kept her visible throughout history. Historians, art historians, and writers of fiction usually emphasize her roles as the mistress of the powerful Cardinal and as the mother of his children: Juan, Duke of Gandia; the notorious Cesare; Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara; and Joffre. Certainly, Cattanei’s life was scandalous by many standards. While married to one man, she lived and slept with, and bore children to another. Her accumulated wealth was not only based on her husbands’ assets, but on her close relationship to Alexander VI. Cattanei’s role as proprietor of successful locande was dependent on three factors coming together in her favor at the right time: money, opportunity, and location. 

It was through her marriages and relationship with Alexander VI that Vannozza acquired the needed funds to purchase or rent the buildings that she converted into her hotels. Although little historical evidence remains that illuminates Cattanei’s early life, her adult life, during which she married three times and outlived all of her husbands, is quite well documented. She first wed Domenico da Rignano in 1469, most likely at the age of 27, and widowed for the first time in 1474. Together with Domenico, she purchased a house on the Via del Pellegrino, near Campo dei Fiori, for 500 ducats, of which 310 were from her dowry. Umberto Gnoli believes that this house might have been a gift from Cardinal Borgia as a sort of recompense for Domenico, although he offers no evidence to support this statement. 

Cardinal Borgia, while holding the high-ranking office of Vice Cancelliere della Chiesa, an appointment that he received from his uncle, Pope Calixtus III Borgia, built a magnificent palace near the Tiber River, for many years the locus of the relationship between him and Cattanei. However, Cattanei, and eventually the Borgia children, would have claimed their legal domicile to be the house in which she lived with her husband. In 1474, while married to Domenico, Cattanei bore Borgia a son, Juan; a year later, Cesare Borgia was born. Domenico’s death in 1475 left her a widow for the first time. Although no known documents reveal the wealth she possessed at this time, she certainly owned the house on the Pellegrino and she inherited a house whose present-day address is Via di S. Maria in Monticelli. Demolished in the nineteenth century, it once displayed the Rignano family coat of arms. 

While a widow, Cattanei gave birth in 1480 to a third Borgia child, a girl named Lucrezia; she then married again. Cattanei’s second husband, Giorgio della Croce, was an educated man from Milan. Why she decided to wed Giorgio is not known, but it might have been a legal agreement so that she could publicly continue her living arrangements with the powerful Cardinal Borgia. Giorgio undoubtedly benefitted from the arrangement; he received a papal appointment in the same year as his wedding. A year later, Cattanei gave birth to a fourth Borgia child, her third son, Joffre. Shortly after Joffre’s birth, Cattanei and the cardinal terminated their cohabitation. By 1486 Cattanei was living with her husband Giorgio; he fathered her next child, Ottaviano, who died after only two months.

At Giorgio’s death that same year, his inventory revealed that he and his wife owned two houses on the Pellegrino and one on the Piazza di Pizzo Merlo because the couple’s only son had died. Widowed again, Cattanei now had legal ownership of all properties. With her relationship as mistress to Cardinal Borgia now over, the widow married again, on June 8, 1486, with a 1000-ducat dowry. Her third husband, the Milanese Carlo Canale, was in the service of Cardinal Giovanni Giacomo Sclafenato of Parma. Both Cardinal Sclafenato and Carlo moved to Rome, where Carlo’s career prospered. Over the next few years, Canale and Cattanei bought vigne and houses in the Rione Monti, not far from the church of San Martino.

Many years later when Cattanei donated considerable sums to charitable organizations, she asked that prayers be said by the priests of San Salvatore for herself and her husbands—save for Domenico whom she excluded. According to Ettlinger, it was often financially advantageous for a man to allow his wife to conduct a carnal relationship with another, usually more powerful man (“Visibilis,” 771). Cattanei and her husbands bought and sold a variety of properties. She also received, as gifts, many items of expensive jewelry. After her relationship with the cardinal had ended and all three husbands had died, she was left a wealthy widow and continued to live in Rome. During her third marriage, she and her husband had started renting and buying locande in the center of Rome, which most probably brought in considerable sums of money.

Cattanei managed at least six of these small hotels, thus making her an accomplished businesswoman. Gnoli wrote that the terms ospizio, locanda, taverna and osteria all meant rented rooms, usually with food service. He estimated a total of sixty establishments in the center of Rome in the second half of the fifteenth century, the period when Cattanei’s business was flourishing. This figure indicates that she controlled about 10% of the hotel business in the central area around Campo dei Fiori, the major outdoor market where most of the small hotels in this period could be found. The circumstances of Cattanei’s career as an owner of small hotels and their locations can be recovered through documentation of sales, rents, and some lawsuits. 

She operated at least six hotels, whose exact locations are known, though there remain no records concerning their day-to-day operations. Along the Tiber River was the locanda or osteria named the Biscione, very close to the so-called Tor di Nona, a medieval stronghold of the Orsini; from the early fifteenth century, it was used as a pontifical prison. Not far from the Biscione was the Hosteria della Fontana, the Leone Grande, and the Leone Piccolo. The most famous of her hotels was the Locanda della Vacca, a building still standing on its original corner of the Via dei Cappellari and the Via del Gallo at the edge of the Campo dei Fiori, the site of Rome’s famous market place. On November 10, 1500, Cattanei, under the name Vannozza di Carlo Canale, bought half of the Vacca building from Leonardo Capocci, a priest and canon of St. Peter’s, for 1370 ducats. 

Her husband had died by 1500, so she was acting on her own and was in complete control of her own finances during these negotiations. Apparently owning just half of this centrally-located building did not satisfy her, but not until after 1503 was she able to purchase the other half, for the death of Pope Alexander VI and the turmoil that followed likely interfered with the transactions. Documents dated April 1, 1504 refer to her as Vannozza Cataneis de Borgia and verify as false the previous transaction of buying the Vacca and a house on the Via Pellegrino (vendita era stata finta). After the Pope’s death she probably needed to have her claims legalized or at least recognized as valid. She finally acquired the other half of the Vacca building for 1500 ducats from the brothers Pietro, Antonio, and Ciriaco Mattei. 

The exact number of rentable rooms in the Locanda della Vacca is uncertain. However, a rough drawing of the ground plan of the building from 1563 exists in the Archivio di Stato, Rome. The three-story building sat at the busy intersection of the Via dei Cappellari and Vicolo del Gallo. The main doorway, on the Cappellari side, functioned as the main entrance. Once inside, corridors led to the many rooms and a courtyard on the ground level, while there were as many as five staircases leading to the rooms on the two superior floors. Along the front of the building were rentable spaces for four shops which at one time were occupied by a wine shop, a meat shop, a shoe shop, and a hair salon, which provided goods and services needed by tourists and visitors.

Cattanei understood the importance of timing and location in real estate. She acquired the first half of the Vacca in 1500—the year when her former lover, now Pope Alexander VI, called a Jubilee Year—so that she profited from renting rooms to the increased number of visitors to Rome. According to a recent article by Ivana Ait, Cattanei’s career as a female proprietor of several small hotels coincides with a surge in the economic life of Rome, largely due to the return of the papacy from Avignon in 1420 that brought a continuous supply of cardinals, ambassadors, and many others to the city. Records indicate that during the Jubilee of 1450 called by Pope Nicholas V, there was a scarcity of food and beds for the many pilgrims to Rome.

��� Cattanei’s position as former mistress to the Pope and mother of the Borgia children would have helped ensure a solid standing with the Apostolic Camera during the early years of the sixteenth century. Whereas her beauty and personal charms may have brought her money and opportunity, it was her sharp business acumen, like Agnelucci’s, that helped her establish herself as one of the most successful female proprietors in Rome. Although the number of hotels run by men was certainly greater than those owned by women, Cattanei, Agnelucci, and de’ Calvi bring to light the successful careers of some women, who managed their own businesses in Renaissance Rome. In her later years Cattanei, as a pious widow, bestowed many large charitable gifts on her favorite institutions: she even donated her Locanda della Vacca to the Hospital of S. Salvatore near St. John Lateran.

Her generosity to the Ospedale di S. Salvatore can be documented by quite a large file of original documents clearly dated 1502, which print her name in large letters as Vannozza Borgia de Catanei. In another document, a notary identifies her as Vannozza Cattanei detta anche Borgia, and yet another as Vannozza Borgia dei Cattanei. She was clearly using the Borgia name to fashion her own identity despite the fact that she was never the legal wife of the cardinal. In fact, during her own life Cattanei chose to assume public visibility of her connection to the Borgia family by commissioning Sebastiano Pellegrini da Como to renovate the Locanda della Vacca and display her coat of arms prominently on the façade.

The coat of arms included heraldic symbols of the Cattanei, the Canale, and the Borgia, constructing a public identity that linked her to her father’s line, her husband’s line, and the line of her lover and children. Despite her successes in business and her charitable works, Venetian Senator and historian Marino Sanudo provided the following description of her funeral, dated December 4, 1518: “With the Company of the Gonfalone, [Vannozza Cattanei] was buried in Santa Maria del Popolo. She was buried with pomp almost comparable to a cardinal. [She] was 66 years old and had left all of her goods, which were not negligible, to St John Lateran [location of the Hospital of S. Salvatore]. The funerals of the cubiculari/servants of the Pope’s bedrooms are not solemn occasions to some.”

The report indicates that her generosity to San Salvatore was well known, although her relationship with a cardinal who became pope was equally well known, and overshadowed her accomplishments. I have tried to make the case that Vannozza Cattanei was much more than the whore of a cardinal who later became Pope. She was a wife, a widow, a successful businesswoman, and a pious woman with a long record of charitable activity. Instead of being known solely as the mistress of Alexander VI, or the mother of the Duke of Gandia, she should also be remembered for her business acumen and her piety: for this, she was celebrated in the records of her charitable gifts as La Magnifica Vannozza, a noble and generous benefactress.”

- Cynthia Stollhans, “Vannozza Cattanei: A Hotel Proprietress in Renaissance Rome.” in Early Modern Women