It is 1630, the scourge of the plague is raging in the city streets: famine and misery everywhere, and rich families have already abandoned the city.
In this bleak landscape, in the darkness of the evening, a truly mysterious man roams the streets every day, in his carriage drawn by black horses and young pages in livery, so pale as to look dead. Who is this man, and what legend attaches to his figure?
This is Marquis Acerbi, who continued to organize parties and balls in his palace in Porta Romana at No. 3, which indeed became more and more lavish as the epidemic became more virulent. Making it all the more inexplicable is the fact that none of his guests ever fell ill…. There must be a reason why he was called the Devil of Porta Romana!
Among the many legends that tell of the Devil, this one even seems to reveal to us that the Evil One stayed in the city for some time: right here in Milan, at Acerbi Palace, whoseancient doorway and some original decorations we can still admire today… and which we hope to bring you back to visit in person as soon as possible!
Indeed, it seems that in the early 1600s, the Marquis, a politician in the service of the Spanish crown, was leading a hectic and mundane life of lavish spending in an increasingly poor city.For this reason, rumors began to run rampant about the nobleman, who was portrayed as a heartless person, indifferent to the problems of the people.
Over the years it thus came to be described in folk tales as a veritable Devil, the Devil of Porta Romana, looking out only for his own interests even at a critical time such as the plague of 1630 described by Manzoni, despite the fact that the Marquis had actually died well before the arrival of the pandemic in 1622.
Questions then arise: what were the Marquis’ parties actually hiding? And who was this man really, an unconscious madman or Satan?
He would certainly be a great irresponsible person today!
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