Ferrante Pallavicino

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Ferrante Pallavicino (March 23, 1618 – March 5, 1644), was an Italian writer of pasquinades.

Pallavicino was born in Piacenza, Italy, a member of the old Italian family of the Pallavicini. He received a good education at Padua and elsewhere, and early in life entered the Augustinian order, residing chiefly in Venice. For a year he accompanied Ottavio Piccolomini, duke of Amain, in his German campaigns as field chaplain, and shortly after his return he published a number of clever but exceedingly scurrilous satires on the Roman curia and on the powerful house of the Barberini, which was so keenly resented at Rome that a price was set on his head. A Frenchman, Charles de Breche, decoyed him from Venice to the neighborhood of Avignon, and there betrayed him. After fourteen months' imprisonment he was beheaded at Avignon.

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.