Margherita D'Acquaviva

Margherita D'Acquaviva was born on a cold winter day in February 1247 in a small stone house in the village Laviano, Umbria, located in Lake Trasimeno's vicinity. It is a picturesque parish in the valley surrounded by swamps on the route from Montepulciano to the town of Cortona.

The village consisted of several houses scattered throughout the valley with a small marketplace in the center. Here, every few days, the peasants, merchants, and farmers from the nearby villages came to set up stalls to sell their wares. A small church stood among the houses, built from local white limestone found in abundance along the waterways that flowed from the hills. The entire area was inundated with swamps, as the soil was clay and couldn't absorb rainfall. As a result, the entire area became marshy and regularly flooded the surrounding villages.

On the ridge of the hill, Overhead stood a large house where the farmer Guglielmo Il Rosso, known as "Red," lived. He was given that name because of his red hair. He managed the farms of Duke Lorenzo Della Valle, who lived near Montepulciano in a castle surrounded by high walls and virtually invisible to the public.

The house of Guglielmo Il Rosso was a long stone building of which a significant portion was partially used as a barn and partially used as a warehouse. In it, he stored beets and grain and also used it to hang pork forequarters for smoking. In one area, he stored tools that he distributed to farmers with whom he had a sharecropping agreement; half of the produce went to the duke, the landowner, and the other half remained with the farmer.

The house stood on the hilltop and looked down onto the valley of scattered pastures and terraces bordered with rows of small stones to protect their crops from being flooded.

The stone houses scattered in the valley below had roofs made of straw and clay that held them together. The cattle and chickens lived on the ground floor.

To reach the first floor, it was necessary to climb a ladder. The floor was made of planks of rough wooden beams sawn from pine trunks and chestnut trees, trees that grow in natural woods. They grow in exposed areas suitable for farming and grazing sheep and cattle. There were mattresses made of burlap stuffed with dry straw on the floor on the floor on which the family slept. The upper floor was used as the living quarters.

One of those farmers was Tancredi Bartolomeo D'Acquaviva, a tall, burly hardworking man who worked all day in the field tending his grain crop, which sometimes rotted due to excess rain only food the dwellers of the house eating. He lived with his wife Rosalinda, a thin woman with a pretty face, and their eight-year-old daughter Margherita, a happy girl with the face of an angel.

Immediately after the birth of Margherita, Rosalinda was forced to return to work in the fields tending the cattle. Hence, she had no choice but to have Margherita looked after by Graziella, a neighbor's daughter. Because of her ugliness, no man wanted her, and she worked as a housekeeper to help the family put food on the table.

From the day she was born, Graziella bestowed the name "Margherita" on the infant because of her beautiful shining face and golden hair. It reminded her of the white and yellow flowers scattered throughout the meadows during the spring season. Tancredi showed no interest in the naming or anything else that happened at home, but Rosalinda was delighted with the name suggested by the neighbor's girl and adopted it.

When Margherita was three years old, she would stand in a field near her house and look at the sky, staring for hours, watching the clouds and the birds passing. She would do so even on rainy days, shivering in the cold and wet, staring for hours as lightning tore through the sky. Even the echoes of thunder did not frighten her. She stood there as if looking to the Creator and wondering about the beauty of nature and the movement of the heavenly bodies.

She would flood Graziella with questions such as, "Who makes it rain?" or, "Who created the mountains, valleys, and lakes?" Graziella, being the ignoramus that she was, could not answer any of her questions.

Rosalinda became pregnant for the second time, and that is when the problems began. She had contracted tuberculosis and never completely recovered from it. The pregnancy made her very weak, and she could barely get out of bed. She was constantly vomiting, and her skin became so transparent that her veins were visible. She suffered from labored breathing due to viscous mucus in her lungs.

The birth was a tough one because Rosalinda did not have the strength to push the baby out. The local midwife could not stop the flow of blood, which flooded the mattress while she took out the dead baby from the mother. A few hours later, she returned her soul to her maker.

Rosalinda and her baby were buried next to each other in the graveyard of the small church, the church where she used to pray every day. A plain wooden cross made ​​by Tancredi marked the mound of earth under which they were buried. The father stood in front of the grave and looked at the sky as if searching for an explanation to the dual disaster that had befallen him; he was burying his wife and his newborn.

He stood there for many hours, waiting for some sign from heaven. When it got dark, and the snowflakes began accumulating on his hair and shoulders, he turned to go home. When he got home, he silently bowed his head while completely ignoring little Margherita, who was lying, huddled and crying, in the corner on top of a cold, damp rotting pallet.

A few weeks after the death of Rosalinda, when Margherita had barely turned eight years old, her father brought home a new wife. She was short, with rude features, a dark complexion from spending much time in the Tuscan sun, and quite a bit older than Rosalinda. The relationship between her and Margherita could hardly be called loving, as the new wife did not utter a kind word to Margherita and showed no affection whatsoever. She did not care to see Margherita walking around aimlessly most of the day or sitting glued to Graziella, who gave her love and affection.

Within a few months, the new wife became pregnant and ultimately gave birth to a son. Margherita was busy most of the day cultivating her vegetable garden in a small area behind the house. She became completely neglected since the attention of the proud father was given entirely to the new baby. Since neither father nor stepmother acknowledged her existence, Margherita stuck to Graziella, whom she saw as a true friend.

The next year, the new wife became pregnant once again and gave birth to another son. Tancredi's happiness knew no bounds as now he had two sons who eventually would help him in the fields.

When Margherita turned nine, Graziella left for another village where she found steady work as a laundress at the home of a wealthy landowner. She could not earn enough money from the intermittent work that Tancredi threw her way. Margherita suffered most from Graziella's absence and began walking around barefoot and half-naked among the farm animals. During the cold winter days when she played outdoors with neighbors' children, she was not warmly dressed and always wore rags and worn-out clothes...

Despite being beautiful with long golden hair that attracted the attention of strangers and passersby alike, Margherita never once received a caress or a hug, not from her father or her stepmother. At home, she felt detested and unwanted. Her father, Tancredi associated her with his former troubles and turned his head away from her because she reminded him too much of his first wife.

At the age of twelve, Margherita looked after her two younger stepbrothers and became a slave in her own home. Her world centered around household chores and the children. Her best moments were on Sundays when she went with everyone to church to pray and dressed in neat clothing. Market days were also days of joy for her because she felt like a queen when everyone gave her admiring glances because of her extraordinary beauty. She wore clothes that emphasized her budding breasts emerging from beneath her ​​shirt and subtly swayed her hips as she walked among the stalls while traders threw gifts at her. Some gave her apples, while others gave her walnuts from the forest, and deep-fried baked bagels whose smell attracted the market's visitors from all around. At times she even received a chunk of smoked pork or goat's cheese, and at times she sensed the quickness of the traders as they tried to pinch her behind or send her a wink.