ACCORAMBONI, VITTORIA. - Of noble family, she was born at Gubbio in 1557 and soon moved to Rome, where in 1563 she married Francesco Peretti, nephew of Card. Felice Peretti, who later became Pope Sisto V. Fickle, prodigal, but beautiful, she appears, urged by her relatives and especially by her mother, to have accepted the attentions of Paolo Giordano Orsini, duke of Bracciano, and to have plotted to rid herself of her husband and marry him. Peretti was in fact murdered, and in 1581 she took refuge in Orsini’s house. Imprisoned—because they did not dare touch the duke of Bracciano, by then the manifest instigator of the murder—and released upon the promise not to enter into that criminal marriage, she nevertheless contracted it publicly in the year 1584. When, however, Card. Peretti became pope, the two spouses hastened to seek safety in the Venetian State, on Lake Garda. Sisto V did not persecute them; but Paolo Giordano Orsini was struck by death in 1585, allegedly poisoned by the Grand Duke of Florence. The A. withdrew to Padova in that same year, and there was stabbed by Ludovico Orsini. She died with great courage and Christian piety.
Quadrio called her a poetess, and Mazzuchelli devoted an article to her; but she gave poetry only a subject (J. Webster, The Tragedy of P. L. Orsini). Novels were also written about her, one of them very short, which circulated in hundreds of copies commonly found in the libraries of Italy, in the hand of copyists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.