Lucrezia was buried in the convent of Corpus Domini. Today she lies under a simple marble slab with Alfonso and two of their children, Alessandro and Isabella, her last born, who survived her by only two years, and Alfonso’s mother, Eleonora d’Aragona. Beside them is the tomb of Lucrezia and Alfonso’s eldest son, Duke Ercole II; in another lie his daughter, Lucrezia’s granddaughter, also named Lucrezia, who died as a nun in the convent, and Eleonora d’Este, Lucrezia’s only surviving daughter, who also became a nun in Corpus Domini.
In 1570 a devastating earthquake struck Ferrara, shattering much of the beauty of the city Lucrezia had known. Her grandson, Alfonso II, rebuilt the Castello but many churches and palaces still lay in ruins when he died, the last ruler of Lucrezia and Alfonso’s legitimate line, in 1597. The following year, Cesare d’Este, Alfonso’s illegitimate grandson by Laura Dianti, whom he took as mistress after Lucrezia’s death, was expelled from the city by Pope Clement VIII who finally succeeded where Popes Julius and Leo had failed. Cesare d’Este retreated to Modena with what remained of the Este inheritance. The papal legate, Cardinal Aldobrandini, stripped Alfonso I’s treasures, his ‘Titians, from the camerini, and took them to Rome.
Ferrara, once one of the most glittering courts of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sank into apathy under papal governance, becoming a shadow of its former self. There is still a romance about Ferrara. Boswell viewed it as ‘the beautiful remains of a great city’, while in 1846 Dickens wrote of the appeal of ‘the long silent streets and the dismantled palaces where ivy waves in lieu of banners’. Gabriele d’Annunzio called it ‘a city of silence’. The glory of the Este, however, has gone.