The coat of arms carved on the tomb slab of Olimpia de' Cavalieri preserves one of the most intriguing heraldic representations of the Greyhound in seventeenth-century Rome.
Olimpia belonged to the noble Roman Cavalieri family. She married the Florentine Tommaso Baccelli and died in February 1623 at only thirty years of age. She was buried in the chapel of her husband's family. The funerary inscription, now lost, was transcribed by Teodoro Amayden in La storia delle famiglie romane (Vol. I, Rome, 1910, pp. 284–288).
At the center of the coat of arms stands a rampant Greyhound, the heraldic emblem of the Cavalieri family. It is another remarkable example of the prestige the Greyhound achieved within Italian noble symbolism. No longer simply a hunting dog or an aristocratic companion, it became a true family emblem, preserving the identity and memory of a lineage long after its members had passed away.
Every coat of arms tells a story. In this case, it is the story of a young Roman noblewoman—and of a Greyhound that has continued to guard her memory for more than four centuries.
