Caterina Sforza

Beautiful, cultivated, devout, vindictive, fiercely maternal and capable of a violence that startled even her contemporaries, Caterina Sforza refuses every simple definition. She belonged to a world in which blood created power, marriage secured territories, faith accompanied war, and a fortress could mean the difference between sovereignty and captivity.
Caterina Sforza: Behind the Walls of Forlì returns her to the city that shaped the most extraordinary years of her life. Beyond the celebrated episodes of defiance and the legends that transformed her into the "Tigress of Forlì," this intimate historical portrait enters the streets, palaces, churches, convents and fortifications of Renaissance Forlì, with the formidable Rocca di Ravaldino always looming nearby.
Here is Caterina not only as ruler and warrior, but as daughter of the Sforza, wife, widow, lover and mother; as a woman attentive to beauty, medicine and the secrets of the body; as a patron of religious institutions and sacred art; as the implacable avenger of Giacomo Feo; and as a Catholic woman whose faith existed, without easy contradiction, beside ambition, sensuality, political calculation and bloodshed.
Drawing upon chronicles, correspondence and the often overlooked local history of Forlì, Umberto Pasqui reconstructs the material and spiritual world in which Caterina actually lived, carefully separating documented history from the legends that accumulated around her.
The result is neither an indictment nor a celebration. Written with the atmosphere and momentum of a historical novel while remaining faithful to the surviving evidence, Behind the Walls of Forlì brings us unusually close to a Renaissance woman who was feminine and formidable, affectionate and ruthless, believing and sinful, victorious and defeated.
Not a heroine fashioned for modern sensibilities.
Not the monster created by hostile memory.
Not merely the Tigress.
Caterina Sforza, as nearly as five centuries will allow us to meet her.