This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

The feast was going to be extravagant.

The year was 1324, and cousins Ramberto and Farrantino and their uncle, Pandolfo Malatesta,

were making the final preparations for the meal at Ramberto's estate, a castle nestled in the

rolling hills of what is now the region of Emilia Romagna in Italy, then simply called Romagna.

Their sole invitee to this party?

Their other cousin slash nephew, Uberto, and he was making his way toward the castle,

blissfully unaware that he was riding to his death. The three hosts had planned the murder

of their kinsmen perfectly, a theatrical assassination disguised as a friendly family dinner, which would

serve as revenge for sins spanning a generation.

Uberto Malatesta's death at the hands of his family members is a dramatic episode

in a particularly bloody era of Italian history, but not, actually, the topic of today's episode.

A few decades prior to that fateful family banquet, Ramberto's father, a man named

Gianchoto, actually killed Uberto's father.

Remember, Rambarto and Uberto were cousins.

Their fathers were brothers, and Johnchoto discovered his brother having an affair

with his wife. After catching them red-handed, he killed them both. The adulterous affair and

subsequent murder of John Choto's brother, Paolo, and his wife Francesca, would go on to be immortalized by the Italian writer Dante

Aligari as two of the damned characters he meets during his visit to hell. But what Dante

failed to record in his inferno were the numerous intrafamilial murders, political assassinations,

...