FERRANTE

PALLAVICINO (1618-1644)  , Italian writer of pasquinades, a member of the old Italian family of the Pallavicini, was born at Piacenza in 1618 . 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 Amalfi, 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 neighbourhood of Avignon, and there betrayed him . After fourteen months' imprisonment he was beheaded at Avignon on the 6th of March, 1644 . His Opere permesse was published at Venice in 1655, but being, as may be imagined, inferior in scurrility and grossness (Pallavicino's specialities), are much less prized by the curious than the Opere scelte (Geneva, 166o), which were more than once reprinted in Holland, and were translated into German in 1663 .