“Hell Is a More Beautiful Thing to See”: Accounts from the Sack of Rome

After the Spanish, German, and Italian troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome in 1527, eyewitness testimonies quickly streamed from the city’s walls. These ranged from letters to ambassadorial reports, authored by the invaders and the invaded alike. This paper traces key firsthand accounts, which circulated both in the Sack’s immediate aftermath and for well over a century. The paper attends especially to the libro di famiglia of Marcello Alberini, a diary prepared for Alberini’s ancestors that focuses on the Sack, which it treats at length in order to reflect on the event’s implications for both the individual family and the city at large. Alberini’s would become one of the most frequently copied manuscript accounts of Rome’s brutal fall and its aftermath. In later generations, it was also paired with other chronicles, narratives, histories, and additional documents in codices, as well as plagiarized (alongside the histories of Francesco Guicciardini, Luigi Guicciardini, and Benedetto Varchi) in a later spurious history of the Sack. Examining the topoi, objectives, and concerns of Alberini’s text, and works like it, this paper re-considers the written legacy of the Sack on the eve of its Quincentennial.