Maria Bellonci depicts Lucrezia as a passionate, womanly figure moving uncertainly through the Papal court and through the intrigues, ambitions and political chicanery that swirled about her. Married three times for her family's political advantage Lucrezia also entertained, for her own pleasure, a long list of eminent lovers, particularly the poet Pietro Bembo. Her father, Pope Alexander VI, emerges as a fiercely devoted parent while the catlike and sinister Cesare Borgia is seen as a relentless and unscrupulous power-seeker.