Page 192 - The Grotesque Children's Book

gonfaloniere, as her family expected her to do. Her family, the Cappellos, were at the time one
of the wealthiest and most influential families in Venice, and it was assumed that Bianca was to
be married off for an enormous dowry to the highest bidder. Gonfaloniere Venno had failed to
snare a fiancé of any kind, so now he was stooped to purchasing one. Everything was all set.

But then there was that goiter. You perhaps haven't seen a goiter, or even illustrations of
one, but you would know one if you saw it or indeed if you smelled it. Nasty things, goiters.
They look like someone inflated your neck in a few spots, like several peaches have become
stuck in your throat. Can you blame Bianca Cappello for not wanting to become Bianco Venno,
to have to look at and smell that bulbous monstrosity every day of the rest of her life...not to
mention the goiter? Plus, there was her family to think about. Oh, how little in common she had
with them! She liked laughter and singing; they preferred whispers and psalm-reading. She
liked picnics and horse-riding; they preferred wafers and psalm-reading. She liked concerts and
theatre; they preferred psalm-reading and psalm-reading. And they liked the counting of money,
too, that was perhaps equally important to them: acquiring land, titles and things, things, things.
Greedy were the Cappellos. Young Bianca’s part in the machinations of the Familia di Cappello
was to become compliant Lady Goiter and have a dozen little goiterini. Wouldn't you run? You
would. Even if you were only fourteen. But to where? She couldn't simply pawn some jewelry
box of her mother’s armoire and buy herself a fancy life. Venetian society would cast her out, as
surely as Vincenzio Venno's neck cast out foul-smelling protrusions. Nor was Bianca any
sentimentalist for Venice, either, and longed for anything, anywhere with anyone but Vincenzio
Venno.

Her anyone, it turns out, was a perfectly delightful sweet fellow by the name of Pietro
Buonaventuri (which quite happily means Peter Goodluck). She first saw Pietro from her
window in the business district of Venice. He was tall, lithe, young and --

Well, did it matter? They were eloped a few weeks later. He whisked her off under
cover of darkness to his family home near Piazza San Marco. What was in it for Pietro? Several
things, not the least of which was the possibility of aligning himself with a powerful Italian
family. His own family, the Buonaventuri clan, had once been prominent, but a series of
malaventuris to both his grandfather and his father had reduced Pietro to a mere bank clerk
practically on the verge of denarilessness. He thought there was a chance of being tolerated and
then accepted by Bianca's family, perhaps even being given some working capital of his own.
But it was not to be so. The Cappello family gave him not a single florin and, in fact, called the
carabinieri to arrest him and forcibly return their mighty asset (Bianca) back to the family vault.
Pietro was a tricky lad, however, and he and Bianca evaded the carabinieri and fled Venice
entirely, taking up temporary residence in Florence before sneaking back many months later to
live with Mamma Buonaventuri. All that was about money, for which he cared little, though he
was ironically a bank clerk by trade. But the biggest reason he eloped with Bianca Cappello
was, quite simply...he loved her.

He found her laugh infectious, and her joie de vivre enchanting to the fullest. She had a
lovely face; beautiful, in fact, with apricotted cheeks and piercing brown eyes! He delighted in
her stories and her enthusiasm for everything she was experiencing for the first time: art, music,

192