Alessandra Benucci

Lady loved by Ludovico Ariosto as of 1513 and wife of Tito Strozzi, she descended from a Florentine family originally from Montevarchi that had acquired a certain degree of wealth thanks to commerce. Her father, Francesco di Paolo Benucci, settled in Barletta, probably for work, sometime before 1464. There he married a certain Nuta who certainly bore him two children: Pietro, who became a cleric, and Alessandra. Perhaps he also had a third son, Paolo, notary for the harbour customs office. It is highly likely that Alessandra was born in Barletta, presumably in 1481. At just sixteen, in 1497, she married the much older Tito Strozzi, perhaps in Apulia, or maybe in Ferrara or Florence. From 1498 till her husband died (October 1515) she lived in Ferrara in contrada Santa Maria in Vado, near Santa Maria di Bocche, where the Ariosto family resided. Ariosto’s love for Alessandra is recounted in the canzone Non so s’io potrò ben chiudere in rima. We recall vv. 23-28: ‘Dico che ‘l giorno che di voi m’accesi / non fu il primo che ‘l viso / pien di dolcezza e li real costumi / vostri mirassi affabili e cortesi, / Né che mi fosse aviso / che meglio unqua mirar non potea lumi’. Ariosto tells the story of this love of his, that had begun in Florence on 24 June 1513, during a grand feast in honour of Saint John the Baptist. He however says he had loved  Alessandra before then, and it is likely that Ludovico had already met her in the closed circles of the elite of Ferrara or at the house of the sons of  Tito Vespasiano Strozzi. Their affair remained clandestine during the albeit brief period in which Alessandra’s husband, Tito Strozzi, was still alive, and became less hidden in the following years, culminating in a secret marriage in the period between 1528 and1530, secret so that she could continue to benefit from the income from her husband’s inheritance and he continue to be an ecclesiastical beneficiary.