Novels in Florence #34: The Stones of Florence

Renowned for her sharp literary style, essayst and fiction writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) offers a unique history of Florence, from its inception to the dominant role it came to play in the world of art, architecture and Italian culture that captures the brilliant Florentine spirit and revisits the legendary figures - Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli and others who exemplify it so iconically.

Her most cherished sights and experiences color this timeless, graceful portrait of a city that's as famous as it is alluring.

The Stones of Florence is a blend of expression and action about a city so loved that visit is never enough. Throughout this work, Mary Mccarthy offers lucid insights on the relevant history of this superlative city. Many of the author's most cherished sights, sounds, and smells come to life in this esteemed and now classic volume. This book is ideal for reading on the plane ride to Italy, but it's also perfect for armchair travelers, art lovers, and students of the Renaissance. 

Mary McCarthy was a short-story writer, bestelling novelist, essayst and critic. a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, she also wrote Venice Observed, Birds of America, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, among other books.

The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy, Mariner Books, 2002

Novels in Florence #33: The Florentine Revenge

Every city has its secrets and every crime its retribution. On a scorching summer afternoon in the suburbs of Florence, a small girl goes missing at a crowded swimming pool and is never seen alive again. For fifteen years a terrible crime lies unsolved, becoming one of the city's darkest and most shameful secrets, until one bitter winter night another body is found, at another swimming pool, and the case is reopened. Celia Donnelly had just arrived in Florence at the time of the girl's disappearance and can remember only too well the face that filled the front pages of every Italian newspaper. When word of the gruesome new discovery breaks, she is in the midst of arranging a weekend of birthday celebrations for a wealthy Englishman's wife. However, as Celia undertakes what ought to be a routine work assignment, she finds herself more closely involved than she could have ever imagined with a tragedy that has haunted her dreams for fifteen years; and it is Celia who is compelled to bear witness when the past returns to exact a brutal and terrifying revenge.(from book jacket).

A Florentine Revenge, Christobel Kent, Penguin, 2006

Novels in Florence # 32: The Florentine

 

This short historical novel traces the life of Leonardo da Vinci from the time of his birth in 1452, through to his death in 1519. It focuses on Leonardo the person rather than specific achievements with a rare focus on his childhood and early development. In reality little detail is known about Leonardo’s childhood other than his actual birthplace and parents, but the book takes what is known and has been published about his early years by L.H. Heydenriech and G. Vasari and then places the reader in the home of Leonardo the child.

His early development years are also dealt with in the same style in order that the reader gets to know Leonardo the Young man and later the troubled artist, anatomist, thinker and engineer.

All Leonardo’s major accomplishments from the Virgin of the Rocks to Mona Lisa in painting, the Sforza horse in sculpture, his anatomical experiments and engineering drawings are dealt with. His ongoing interest and contribution to flight is included and even the famous letter to Ludovico Sforza is included. Thus the book is historically and biographically accurate, but primarily the book brings Leonardo to life and places the reader there amongst the action that surrounded one of histories great original thinkers. Kevin Streat was born and raised in rural New Zealand. He has lived and worked in differing countries for the last 30 years. He and his Canadian wife now call Cooroy in Queensland Home. (from jacket notes)

The Florentine, Kevin Streat, Createspace, 2012

Novels in Florence #31: Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays

A talented poet and a gifted dramatist, Antonia Pulci (1452-1501) pursued two vocations, first as a wife and later as founder of an Augustinian order.
During and after her marriage, Pulci authored several sacre rappresentazioni—one-act plays on Christian subjects. Often written to be performed by nuns for female audiences, Pulci's plays focus closely on the concerns of women.
Exploring the choice that Renaissance women had between marriage, the convent, or uncloistered religious life, Pulci's female characters do not merely glorify the religious life at the expense of the secular.
Rather, these women consider and deal with the unwanted advances of men, negligent and abusive husbands and suitors, the dangers of childbearing, and the disappointments of child rearing. They manage households and kingdoms successfully. Pulci's heroines are thoughtful; their capacity for analysis and action regularly resolve the moral, filial, and religious crises of their husbands and admirers. (from book jacket)
Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays, University of Chicago Press, 1996

Novels in Florence #30: Murder of a Medici Princess

In Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline Murphy illuminates the brilliant life and tragic death of Isabella de Medici, one of the brightest stars in the dazzling world of Renaissance Italy, the daughter of Duke Cosimo I, ruler of Florence and Tuscany.

Murphy is a superb storyteller, and her fast-paced narrative captures the intrigue, the scandal, the romantic affairs, and the violence that were commonplace in the Florentine court. She brings to life an extraordinary woman, fluent in five languages, a free-spirited patron of the arts, a daredevil, a practical joker, and a passionate lover. Isabella, in fact, conducted numerous affairs, including a ten-year relationship with the cousin of her violent and possessive husband. Her permissive lifestyle, however, came to an end upon the death of her father, who was succeeded by her disapproving older brother Francesco. Considering Isabella's ways to be licentious and a disgrace upon the family, he permitted her increasingly enraged husband to murder her in a remote Medici villa. To tell this dramatic story, Murphy draws on a vast trove of newly discovered and unpublished documents, ranging from Isabella's own letters, to the loose-tongued dispatches of ambassadors to Florence, to contemporary descriptions of the opulent parties and balls, salons and hunts in which Isabella and her associates participated. Murphy resurrects the exciting atmosphere of Renaissance Florence, weaving Isabella's beloved city into her story, evoking the intellectual and artistic community that thrived during her time. Palaces and gardens in the city become places of creativity and intrigue, sites of seduction, and grounds for betrayal.

Here then is a narrative of compelling and epic proportions, magnificent and alluring, decadent and ultimately tragic. (from jacket notes)

Murder of a Medici Princess, Caroline P. Murphy, Oxford University Press, 2009

Novels in Florence #29: April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici

One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici.
On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood moves outward in time and space from that murderous event, unfolding a story of tangled passions, ambition, treachery, and revenge. The conspiracy was led by one of the city's most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici's swaggering new role as political bosses--but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples, and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsular war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family's survival.
The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal--plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the larger Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family was expunged or destroyed.
April Blood offers us a fresh portrait of Renaissance Florence, where dazzling artistic achievements went side by side with violence, craft, and bare-knuckle politics. At the center of the canvas is the figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent--poet, statesman, connoisseur, patron of the arts, and ruthless "boss of bosses." This extraordinarily vivid account of a turning point in the Italian Renaissance is Lauro Martines, former Professor of European History at the University of California, Los Angeles, is renowned for his books on the Italian Renaissance. The author of Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, and most recently of Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance, he reviews for The Times Literary Supplement and lives in London with his wife, novelist Julia O'Faolainund to become a lasting work of history. (from jacket notes)
April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici, Lauro Martines, Oxford University Press, 2004

Novels in Florence #28: It Happened in Florence

I live here! This is my life!

Nita Tucker's four years in Florence are a lesson about how staying true to your dreams is really the only option. As editor-in-chief of The Florentine, the English language newspaper she set up with her husband and Italian partners, Nita's days in Florence were packed with interviewing politicians, princesses, designers and celebrities and accepting privileged invitations to palazzos, country estates, galleries and parties.

In between, Nita laughed and cried with her girlfriends over family, fashion, cultural differences and making a difference in their beloved Florence.

With the many highs came a few inevitable lows including Nita?s realization that it was her dream to live in Europe and not her husband and daughter?s - and that The Florentine was never going to pay her a living wage. It Happened in Florence is a story about living a life with no regrets, celebrating the discovery that those who love you most - will love you all the more for living a life without compromise. (from jacket notes)

It Happened in Florence, Nita Tucker, Createspace, 2011

Novels in Florence #27: The Memory Cathedral

The Memory Cathedral is the secret history of Leonardo da Vinci, adventurer, traveller, inventor, and lover of Lorenzo the Magnificent′s mistress.

Based on Leonardo′s own notebooks, this expansive, multi-layered novel is ostensibly about Leonardo′s flying machines.

But it is really a magical exploration of the man, his drives, his loves, his friends, and fabulous inventions. It takes place in the Florence of Lorenzo de Medici and in the fabled, mythical east. Indeed, there is real evidence that Leonardo travelled to Egypt and Persia under the protection of the Devatdar of Syria, Lieutenant of the Sacred Sultan of Babylon.

Imagine what would happen if Leonardo de Vinci had been given the chance to put his fabulous inventions to use - his bombs and machine guns and submarines and tanks and flying machines. Imagine Leonardo and a young Niccolo Machiavelli flying in a balloon over Egypt. Imagine Leonardo′s closest friend Sandro Botticelli being exorcised in Florence and riding through deserts with the Caliph of Egypt. Imagine living in the dangerous day to day world of the Renaissance and knowing intimately the greatest personages of the age.

That is the experience of reading The Memory Cathedral. (from jacket notes - Bantam Books)

The Memory Cathedral, Jack Dann, Bantam Books, 1996

Novels in Florence #26: Incognita

This is the only available edition of a brilliant novel by the leading Restoration dramatist and author of The Way of the World.
Masked balls, mistaken identity, and fanciful deceits run riot in this hilarious tale of love and intrigue by the master of the Restoration comedy.
Returning to Florence on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, Aurelian - together with his sworn companion Hippolito - dons his disguise in anticipation of the famous Florentine ball. Once there, the two are soon separated, and each finds himself paired off with a beautiful - and masked - woman.
Whilst Aurelian yearns to learn the true identity of his 'love', Hippolito is mistaken for another and brazenly plays along with the conceit. Chaos abounds as masks are dropped, truth revealed, and, somehow, all ends happily. (from jacket notes - Hesperus Press)
William Congreve (1670-1729), the most celebrated of the Restoration comedy writers, was the son of an English officer living in Ireland, and was educated at Trinity, Dublin. His first play, The Old Bachelor, written at the age of twenty-three, was a great success. The Double Dealer, following almost immediately, brought forth the praise of Dryden, the autocrat of English letters. At the age of twenty-seven Congreve had gained a prestige scarcely less in importance than that of Dryden himself. Not only as a comic wit, but as a writer of noble tragedy was he esteemed.
In his praise it should be said that, for almost the first time in England, he brought to the service of the stage a painstaking art. He cared much about the way a sentence was built, about balance, and getting the right shade of meaning. His diction is exactly fitted for oral use; and his pictures of the world of wealth and fashion are diverting. Congreve is, perhaps, the only English writer who can really be compared with Molière.
Incognita, William Congreve, Hesperus Classics, 2003

Novels in Florence #25: The Arno Serpent

Florence is at war with Pisa. Leonardo is commissioned to divert the river cutting off Pisa from the sea and thereby protecting Florence. At this time the political and social climate in Florence is unfavorable to Leonardo and he is encouraged to accept the invitation of the French King to come to Milan.
The Signoria puts 2000 men to work on the river project.
When three workmen are discovered mutilated on the riverbank and a serpent with glowing eyes has been sited Leonardo is recalled from Milan to solve the mystery.
With the help of Niccolo da Pavia, Leonardo uses a device of his own to "snare the monster" but this disturbs another serpent of less imposing size but no less lethal.
To trap Leonardo Niccolo's wife, Donna Elenora is abducted by the Viper and held in a castle. A plan to rescue her includes the commedia dell'arte troupe I Comici Buffoni.
(from jacket notes - iUniverse Inc.)
A professional actor/director and student of history, George Herman won a McKight Foundation Award for his play A COMPANY OF WAYWARD SAINTS (Samuel French), authored many books featuring Leonardo da Vinci and was a national finalist in the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program.
The Arno Serpent, George Herman, iUniverse Inc., 2007