RENAISSANCE WOMAN

On the island of Ischia, near Naples, stands a fortress, a formidable set of battlements and turrets that seem to shoot out of sheer rock, with a vertiginous drop to the sea below.

It was here at the Aragonese Castle that the teenage Vittoria Colonna came to be married in 1509, and returned after the death of her husband, to channel her distress through a set of sonnets, the start of an outpouring that would make her the first woman to have a volume of poetry published in Italy.