Ugo d'Este

[2][3] Other sources report a different beginning to the affair: to escape the plague of 1423, they took refuge in the castello di Fossadalbero and there in the small castle their relationship was born.

[4] A maid reported the affair to Nicholò, who spied on the lovers and had them imprisoned in the castle where they were sentenced to death by decapitation.

The Renaissance Italian author Matteo Bandello wrote on it the novel 44 of the 1st part of his Novelle (Lucca, Busdrago, 1554); on this text the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega took inspiration to compose his most famous tragedy, El castigo sin venganza (Punishment Without Revenge, first published 1631);[5] Edward Gibbon told this story in his Miscellaneous Works, and George Byron wrote the poem Parisina in 1816.

A libretto by Felice Romani after the English poem was set to music by Gaetano Donizetti in 1833 as Parisina.

Pietro Mascagni composed a tragic opera Parisina based on the lyric tragedy written by Gabriele D'Annunzio in 1912 as another adaptation of Byron's poem.