For a year he accompanied the general Ottavio Piccolomini in his German campaigns as field chaplain, and in 1641, shortly after his return, he published a number of clever but exceedingly scurrilous satires on the Roman Curia and on the powerful house of the Barberini,[2] held together by the frame story expressed in its title, Il Corriero svaligiato ("The Post-boy Robbed of his Bag").

[3] In this novella published in 1641,[4] four courtiers read and comment on a post-bag of letters that their noble master has ordered stolen from a courier, which include some political ones written by the Spanish governor of Milan.

In March 1642, the pro-papal party in the Venetian Senate proposed legislation to banish Pallavicino and forbid the sale of Il Corriero, but despite receiving four votes the measure failed to pass.

It was the country folk's practice to make a racket on pots and pans (baccinata) in order to disperse a swarm of bees — the heraldic emblem of the Barberini — that were settling in an undesirable place.

"[7]Even more notorious was La Retorica delle puttane[8] ("The Rhetoric of Whores"), which Muir describes as a "scandalous anti-Jesuit work", which "demonstrates why Pallavicino was the only Italian author of his epoch capable of a coherent vision that integrated satire, skepticism, and naturalistic morality."

"[10] La Retorica delle puttane (1643)[11] proved to be a step too far, and in the autumn of 1643 Pallavicino had to flee Venice for Bergamo, where he completed the first volume of his last work, Il Divortio celeste[12] ("The Celestial Divorce"), published in 1643, which Muir reports "came to be known, in the words of a contemporary, as 'superior to all others in impiety and blasphemies against the Roman Church.

Il Divortio became a sensation in Italy (where Muir notes it was sold "under the counter"), and was plagiarized in Protestant countries, where German, Swedish, French, Dutch and English translations appeared.

A bibliography of his scattered works and ephemera and a rigorous chronology of their numerous reprints and translations was compiled by Laura Coci, "Bibliografia di Ferrante Pallavicino", Studi secenteschi 24 (1983:221-306).