Historical horror thread for #halloween. You’re a traveller in renaissance Italy, and come across this castle. From an upper window comes the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard. It’s getting dark and you need somewhere to stay. Should you knock on the door? ABSOLUTELY NOT! 
This is the home of Carlo #Gesualdo. Prince of Venosa, composer of intensely expressive madrigals and sacred music, brutal murderer, and practitioner of #witchcraft! He led an extraordinary life of #horror and beauty, the details of which are truly gruesome. So brace yourselves.
Gesualdo was a small-time prince from Campania who needed to marry well. A match was arranged between the 20yo Carlo and his 25yo cousin Maria d'Avalos. Gesualdo was her 3rd husband. She was an experienced woman and Gesualdo was bookish and awkward, with an obsession for music.
The marriage was a disaster, and before long Maria had taken a lover, the handsome Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria. On the night of 16 October 1590 our anti-hero returned home to find the two lovers literally at it. In a mad rage Gesualdo murdered them both. Brutally.
He stabbed them both repeatedly with his sword, in the head, face, neck, chest, stomach, kidneys, arms, hands, and shoulders. He then shot Fabrizio, twice. Once in the chest, and then after reloading, again in the head.
He left the room, to return to the guests he had brought home with him. They and the servants had heard EVERYTHING. His hands dripping with blood, then said “I do not believe they are dead!” And went back in, where he did more violence, including the mutilation of their genitals.
The next morning officials from Naples arrived to investigate. Their records detail the gory scene. Underneath Fabrizio they found holes “made by swords which had passed through the body, penetrating deeply into the floor.” They also noted “a bit of the brain had oozed out”.
BUT, a prince being a prince, Gesualdo walked free. But he was not untroubled. He became tormented by what he had done, and terrified for his soul. He took to writing wild, radical music, which broke the rules. Unhinged harmonies, crazy chromatic shifts. But arrestingly beautiful
He is remembered as the prolific musical pioneer, who murdered his wife and lover. His music was a big influence on C20th modernist like #Schoenberg and #Stravinsky. But the strangeness of his life does not end there.
Gesualdo was unable to move on. His tortured soul found expression not only in his music but in the bedroom. Though he remarried, he had a pair of mistresses, Aurelia and Polisandra. However, his wife Eleonora, had enough and ordered that his concubines be tried. For witchcraft.
Under torture by the inquisition the details of their antics came out. Apparently Aurelia made Gesualdo drink her menstrual blood, while Polisandra would take a slice of bread and after having sex, place it inside her “nature” until it was soaked, and then give it to him to eat.
Both were found guilty of witchcraft, and order to be imprisoned. In Gesualdo's castle! SERIOUSLY. No prizes for guessing who this suited best. By this time, Carlo’s sexual tastes were clearly anything but vanilla…
Gesualdo’s demons gave him no peace, “unless ten or twelve young men, whom he kept specially for the purpose, were to beat him violently three times a day, during which operation he was wont to smile joyfully.” He even kept a servant whose duty it was to beat him “at stool”.
And this poor reader is how our prince of darkness met his end. At the age of 47, in a particularly intense masochistic session, he was beaten to death by his servants. Though rumours persisted that they had been put up to it by his wife.
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