as a daughter and that she was not ready for the wedding. Moreover, if Ludovico had died early, her father would not have been able, like him, to find her a good husband. He even offered to give her the dowry in her place, in order to convince him to desist. Despite the strong protests, he reluctantly had to agree, after months of negotiations, to part with it. Immediately after the departure of his niece, he wrote embittered to his daughter Eleonora: "God knows how much we grieved, for the singular love we had for her virtues [...] that seeing her and having her at home it seemed to us that we had you". Given the importance of the groom, the parents tried to bring the wedding forward to 1488, but Louis made his father-in-law understand that he was too busy in the affairs of state and that the bride was still too young. The date was set for May 1490 and a dowry of 40,000 ducats was arranged; From May, however, Ludovico postponed to the summer, then canceled for the umpteenth time, disconcerting the dukes of Ferrara who at this point doubted his real will to marry Beatrice. The reason for this behavior was attributed to the well-known relationship that Ludovico had with the beautiful Cecilia Gallerani. To apologize for the constant postponements, in August 1490 he offered the bride a splendid necklace as a gift. In Milan (1491-1497) The wedding The official nuptials were to have taken place in January 1491 in a double wedding with Beatrice marrying Ludovico and Isabella marrying Francesco at the same time, but the Duke of Bari postponed it more than once. Finally, around a year later, they were wed in a double Sforza-Este wedding: Ludovico married Beatrice, while Beatrice's brother, Alfonso d'Este, married Anna Sforza, the sister of Gian Galeazzo Sforza. Leonardo da Vinci orchestrated the wedding celebration. In Milan Beatrice will have two people dear in particular: the son-in-law Galeazzo Sanseverino, her faithful companion of adventures, and Bianca Giovanna, illegitimate daughter of Ludovico and wife of the aforementioned Galeazzo, at the time of her father's wedding a nine-year-old girl, whom Beatrice immediately loved and wanted with her on every occasion. Late consummation The marriage was immediately declared consummated, in truth it remained secretly blank for over a month. Ludovico in fact, out of respect for the innocence of the bride, did