leave his monastery and take refuge with Loredan," writes Muir, "and during the summer of 1642 he escaped Venice, traveling home to Parma, to Friuli, and back to Parma, only to return in August to see a woman." Later career Despite these travails, Pallavicino continued his satiric attacks on the Pope. In the 18 months following the publication of Il Corriero, he wrote four more books. In 1642 appeared his Baccinata ouero battarella per le api barberine, a "Drumming against the Barberini bees, on the occasion of Our Lord Pope Urban the Eighth taking up arms against Parma" in the First War of Castro against Odoardo Farnese, duke of Parma and Castro. It was the country folk's practice to make a racket on pots and pans (baccinata) in order to disperse a swarm of bees — the heraldic emblem of the Barberini — that were settling in an undesirable place. The Baccinata took the form of a letter to Francesco Vitelli, papal nuncio at Venice, comparing the papal actions unfavourably with those of Christ: Christ shed his own blood, and Our Lord sheds the blood of others and promises eternal life to those who shed the most Christian blood... and if the shepherd is only permitted a thin rod with which to control the sheepfold, or better still, nothing at all, as Christ said to the Apostles, 'Do not carry any rod with you on the way', what can be said of Our Lord and Pastor, who scatters the herd of the Church with swords, guns, arquebuses and cannons?" Even more notorious was La Retorica delle puttane ("The Rhetoric of Whores"), which Muir describes as a "scandalous anti-Jesuit work", which "demonstrates why Pallavicino was the only Italian author of his epoch capable of a coherent vision that integrated satire, skepticism, and naturalistic morality." La Retorica is written in the form of a dialogue between an aged prostitute and her naive apprentice. The older woman is sick, poor, and miserable because, she explains, she "did not know to stop at rhetoric, wanting to go on to learn philosophy." Muir explains, "By 'rhetoric,' she means the arts of simulation and dissimulation, which would have brought her pleasure and riches, without danger, while philosophy, with its pretension to discovering truth, has brought her the ruin of emotional authenticity." The fifteen lessons of the old whore were based on Cypriano de Soarez's De arte