relapse of the disease, after which she made her will and arranged her burial. At the age of forty-six years, "The Tiger of Forlì", who had "frightened all of Romagna", died on 28 May 1509. Her body was placed in a small tomb in the chapel of Le Murate in Florence, a convent of nuns whom Caterina had befriended during her time in that city, and where she had kept a cell as a spiritual retreat. During the 1830s, the nuns were forced to leave the property, and in 1845 it was redesigned as a prison. Sometime during this renovation, Caterina's bones disappeared. Appearance and personality This is how the Florentine historian Bartolomeo Cerretani describes her: "She was wise, animose, great: complex, beautiful face, she spoke little. She wore a satin robe with two arms of trawl, a black velvet caper on the French, a man's girdle, and scarsella full of golden ducats; a sickle for the use of retort next to it, and among the soldiers at the foot, and on horseback was feared much, because that woman with weapons in hand was proud and cruel. She was the non-legitimate daughter of Count Francesco Sforza, the first captain of his time and to whom she was very similar in soul and daring, and she did not lack, being adorned with singular virtue, of some vice not small nor vulgar." Marin Sanudo called her "female almost virago, cruelest", in relation to the massacre she made of the children and pregnant women of the conspirators, following the death of her second husband Giacomo Feo. The leader says she is "cunning", ready to change parties on the occasion, but specifies that "to be a woman she is not without fear of her own things". The future cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, in a letter in which he narrates to Piero de' Medici the "strange takeover" of Caterina with the Duke of Calabria Ferrandino d'Aragona (which took place on September 23, 1494), described her ugly in the face, bringing back in this the impressions of Ferrandino himself. In fact, although Caterina had a reputation among posterity as a woman of great beauty, the medals of the time depict a woman with masculine traits and somewhat corpulent. Around 1502, according to an informant of Isabella d'Este, Caterina was "so fat that I could not make the comparison". Corpulence was, moreover, very common within the