As Felice della Rovere lived out her childhood years, likely in Rome, her actual father Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere had become a chief advisor to the pope, Innocent VIII. After many failures, setbacks and disappointing notes, the Rome of Innocent VIII had begun to fall into old patterns of violence and crime. Unpaid debts made creditors anxious, the debt Naples owed to the papacy would not come in and two of the pope's chief advisors could not agree. The vice-chancellor Cardinal Rodrigo Borja was at odds with Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere over whether the pope could bequeath certain benefits to his own family members. The story told is they had this fight in the same room with the dying pope.
From this point on, and for the next twenty months, the two would disagree, publically over this same issue of how a pope could treat his issues. It would be Cardinal Borja who was elected to be the next pope, Alexander VI and within eight months he would have two of his children betrothed in order to solidify those children as alliances with prominent houses. Cardinal della Rovere would protest and Rodrigo, now pope would make a bigger occasion out of it than last time.
A year after becoming pope, Alexander VI submitted a list of names of persons he wanted to be received as cardinals into the college. One of them was his own 18 or 19 year old son, Cesare. It was told this had set Cardinal Giuliano into such a rage that he had to spend several days recuperating from fever after refusing, along with ten other cardinals to attend the consistory and vote on such a measure. Through the winter della Rovere tried to drum up support to have this Borja pope thrown out. He would not succeed.
With the news in 1494 that the King of Naples had died, tremors of more changes spread throughout Europe. By spring of that year, Cardinal della Rovere had decided to leave Rome after nearly a dozen years, in the center of it all and return again to France. It is also likely he sent his daughter Felice out of the city for her own protection. Despite the good home she was living in, Cardinal Giuliano had taken a public stance against the current pope, who simply knew everyone and had enough money to get to anyone in Rome. And this not only put himself in danger, he thought, but the life of his daughter as well. If Guiliano was to have a chance to secure his daughter in a useful alliance, as this Borja pope was blatantly doing, she would have to be kept far away.
So she was sent to Savona, a distant fishing town on the way to Nice, near Genoa, to her father's sister's house. There Felice would go through adolescence with a heightened sense of self in a backwater town run by merchants. The sophistication and excitement of Rome was far away. Her relatives including a female cousin would not likely be as impressed with her, since her mother had never married her father. This pychological take on Felice's adolescent life is briefly [chs 8-9], but compellingly made in Caroline Murphy's book.
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Caroline P Murphy: The Pope's Daughter: the Extraordinary Life of Felice della Rovere ; Oxford University Press, New York, 2005
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