Anatole Riggio, Beatrice, Ginevra, Pietro Catanio, and Father Anselmo are not patterned on historical figures. Similarly, Silvana, the Gypsy cook; her daughter, Betta; Giorgio, the groom; and the other servants in the Fontana household, are not actual people. But these characters, or men and women very like them, surely lived and toiled, unrecorded, among the sixty thousand inhabitants of sixteenth-century Bologna.