Альфонсо II: Неаполь королі және Қалабриа герцогының тағдыры

Alfonso II (4 November 1448 – 18 December 1495) was Duke of Calabria and ruled as King of Naples from 25 January 1494 to 23 January 1495. He was a soldier and a patron of Renaissance architecture and the arts. Heir to his father Ferdinand I's Kingdom of Naples, Alfonso held the dukedom of Calabria for most of his life. Instigated by Lodovico Sforza, who wished to stir up trouble to allow him to seize power in Milan, and with papal support, Charles decided to reassert the Angevin claim to Naples. He invaded Italy in September 1494 and was able to move swiftly south along the peninsula. Alfonso managed to regain the support of Pope Alexander VI, who invited Charles to devote his effort against the Turks instead. Alfonso was crowned on 8 May 1494 by the papal legate Juan de Borja Lanzol de Romaní, el mayor. Charles, however, did not relent; by early 1495 Charles was approaching Naples, after having defeated Florence and the Neapolitan fleet under Alfonso's brother Frederick at Porto Venere. Alfonso, terrified by a series of portents, as well as unusual dreams and despised by Neapolitans, he abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand II. He then fled to a Sicilian monastery. He died in Messina later that year.

At a young age he was described by ladies and ambassadors as a very handsome young man, "So pretty you couldn't say", but "so alive that he couldn't sit still for half an hour". Doctors and ambassadors were surprised by his physical endurance, as he was able to keep himself healthy while eating and drinking very little and often in a hurry, being continuously busy in different activities during the day and resting a few hours at night, which he spent continuously with his wife. He was nicknamed the Guercio by the people because he had his left eye marked, but it is not known whether from illness, from injury or from birth. According to other historians, this was instead because of his grim look and the habit of looking crooked. Francesco Pansa judges instead that he was squinting. He had exceptional military skills and spent most of his life on the battlefields, leading a soldier's life. Andrea Bernardi says that, following the death of the famous leader Roberto Sanseverino, Alfonso remained the first armigero of Italy. However, he was greatly feared and hated by the Neapolitan people for having offended their subjects with "most cruel insults and offenses", for having been guilty of the most heinous crimes, such as "violating virgins, taking other women for his pleasure" and practicing "Detesting and abominable vice of sodomy". For example, the anonymous author of the Chronicum venetum reports but it should be remembered that the Venetians were sworn enemies of the Neapolitans and of the Aragones in particular who "wanting to narrate tyranny, cruelty, lustful and dishonest appetites, betrayals, the assassinations, the murders of King Ferrante and of Alfonso d'Aragona, his eldest son, Duke of Calabria, father of betrayals, conservative of rebels, a great book would not be enough for me: I believe that Nero was a saint among these tyrants". Beyond the possible exaggerations of enemy faction, many episodes of Alfonso's life confirm these aspects of his character, such as the fact that he expropriated numerous lands without offering any compensation to the legitimate owners (who, it is said, died of pain) for the construction of the villa of Poggioreale, and that in the same way he evicted the nuns of La Maddalena for the construction of the villa called della Duchesca He also obtained for the Como – family friends – the splendid garden that Francesco Scannasorice owned adjacent to their palace: the man had refused numerous times to cede the garden to the Como, despite the generous offers of money, but he did not dare to oppose a refusal to the fearsome Duke of Calabria. The Neapolitans were so terrified that at the death of King Ferrante they all ran to barricade themselves in the house shouting "inside! inside! ", not even if they were chased by enemies. His wife Ippolita Maria Sforza herself experienced its cruelty when, newly married, jealous of her husband, she sent her own trusted servant, Donato, to keep an eye on Alfonso in his travels, and Alfonso's reaction towards Donato was of such recklessness that Hippolyta wrote to her mother in her own letter: "This thing about Donato that I will never forget [ ] not a wound to the heart, but I think it opened in the middle, so much was my pain and it will be". It was no coincidence that, when the situation of the kingdom became desperate, Alfonso decided to abdicate in favor of his son, since he was so hated for his vices and cruelty as vices Ferrandino loved for his virtues and justice.

According to the Successi tragici et amorosi by Silvio Ascanio Corona, a seventeenth century collection of novels in which the secrets of the members of the Aragonese court of Naples are collected – or at least it seems – Alfonso had many mistresses, thus not differing from his father Ferrante. His first mistress was Isabella Stanza, bridesmaid of his mother Isabella of Chiaramonte; the relationship, however, did not last long. As soon as the mother – a very chaste and very religious woman – had a hint of the relationship, she married Isabella to Giovan Battista Rota, a nobleman very fond of the Aragonese faction, and thus to distance her from her son. Poggio Reale, which Giorgio Vasari said was designed by Giuliano da Maiano and was laid out in the 1480s, has utterly disappeared and no extensive description has survived. Decades later, Vasari reported, "At Poggio Reale [Giuliano da Maiano] laid out the architecture of that palazzo, always considered a most beautiful thing; and to fresco it he brought there Pietro del Donzello, a Florentine, and Polito his brother who was considered in that time a good master, who painted the whole palazzo, inside and out, with the history of the said king." There are no archives to connect Giuliano or his brother Benedetto with the project; for documentation only a section and plan, reproduced with apologies for its inaccuracy, by Sebastiano Serlio. Serlio's reproduction seems to show an idealized plan, identical on all four sides, ranged around a court with a double arcading. It is clear that the Aragonese court at Naples introduced the Moorish garden traditions of Valencia, with its shaded avenues and baths, sophisticated hydraulics that powered splendid waterworks, formal tanks, fishponds and fountains, as a luxurious and secluded setting for court life, and combined them with Roman features: Alfonso's Poggio Reale was built around three sides of an arcaded courtyard with tiers of seating round a sunken centre that could be flooded for water spectacles; on the fourth side it opened onto a garden that framed a spectacular view of Vesuvius. It was all unlike anything experienced by the French king, who retreated from Italy, loaded with tapestries and works of art, and filled with building and gardening ambitions, but he would die young only three years later.