1. For these details, see Giacinto Gigli, Diario Romano (1608–1670), ed. Giuseppe Ricciotti (Rome, 1958), pp. 274–5. The Barberini family had built a magnificent palace on the Quirinal hill, but Anna, Taddeo, and the children subsequently relocated to an older palace on the via dei Giubbonari, near Campo de’ Fiori.
2. See Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 154, 242–4;
3. John Beldon Scott, Images of Nepotism: The Painting Ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991), pp. 198–9.
4. For the place of women in the Roman aristocratic family, see the bibliography in note 20 below. Critics of powerful seventeenth-century women charged that Roman women in general exercised too much power. See Marina D’Amelia, “La nuova Agrippina. Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj e la tirannia femminile nell’immaginario politico del Seicento,” in I linguaggi del potere nell’età barocca, vol. 2, Donne e sfera pubblica, ed. Francesca Cantù (Rome, 2009), pp. 45–95, esp. pp. 56–7. I am grateful to Françoise Hamlin for conversations on the difficulties of tracing women’s political activities in the past and to Paula Findlen for her insights on writing early modern women’s lives. Audiences at the following institutions and conferences sharpened my thinking on early modern women, politics, and society: University of California at Los Angeles; Sixteenth-Century Studies; and Renaissance Society of America.
5. Giulia Calvi, “‘Cruel’ and ‘Nurturing’ Mothers: The Construction of Motherhood in Tuscany (1500–1800),” L’Homme 17.1 (2006): 75–92. Early modern motherhood is now receiving greater scrutiny as a historical topic.