Mantua. Rainaldo Bonacolsi, known as Passerino, is caught off guard while resting by a coup plotted by the Gonzagas. Rainaldo mounts his horse, but is overtaken and wounded. While fleeing on horseback, he strikes his head against the marble doorpost of the palace and falls dead to the ground. In the frantic hours that follow, all his relatives are murdered, some in very violent and gruesome ways: according to one version, his son Francesco is killed in the clash, his genitals torn off and stuffed into his mouth as a disfigurement; while according to another version, Francesco is captured and left to starve in prison. This is the end of the Bonacolsi family in Mantua. The body of Passerino Bonacolsi, on the advice of a sorceress or augur to the Gonzagas, is stuffed and kept in the Hall of Metamorphoses of the Ducal Palace in Mantua, an area known as the Galleria del Passerino. The Gonzagas’ superstition, in fact, held their fortune tied to the presence of their stuffed enemy. As chance would have it, Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga’s wife, more than four centuries later, had Bonacolsi’s stuffed body thrown into the lake, tired of keeping that sad reminder in her apartments. Ferdinando Carlo would indeed be the last Duke of Mantua, as superstition dictated. Mantua would be incorporated into the Habsburg Empire.
