Ferrante Pallavicino

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Ferrante Pallavicino (born March 23, 1618 in Piacenza, Italy; died March 5, 1644 in Avignon) was an Italian writer of pasquinades.

Pallavicino was a member of the old Italian family of the Pallavicini. He received a good education at Padua and elsewhere, and early in life entered the Augustinian order, residing chiefly in Venice. For a year he accompanied Ottavio Piccolomini, duke of Amain, in his German campaigns as field chaplain, and shortly after his return he published a number of clever but exceedingly scurrilous satires on the Roman curia and on the powerful house of the Barberini, which was so keenly resented at Rome that a price was set on his head. A Frenchman, Charles de Breche, decoyed him from Venice to the neighborhood of Avignon, and there betrayed him. After fourteen months' imprisonment he was beheaded at Avignon.

His writings were published at Rome in two folio volumes in 1656-1657 (2nd ed., considerably modified, in 1666). In this he continued the task begun by Terenzio Alciati, who had been commissioned by Pope Urban VIII to correct and supersede the very damaging work of Sarpi on the same subject. Alciati and Pallavicino had access to many important sources from the use of which Sarpi had been precluded; the contending parties, however, are far from agreed as to the completeness of the refutation. The work was translated into Latin by a Jesuit named Giattinus (Antwerp, 1670-1673). There is a good edition of the original by Zaccharia (6 vols., Faenza, 1792-1799). It was translated into German by Klitsche in 1835-1837. He also wrote a life of Alexander VII and a tragedy (Ermenegildo, 1644), etc.

His collected Opere were published in Rome in 1844-1848.