Book description
In 1700, a Venetian priest, Fra Benedict Loredan, compiles an assembly
of documents - letters, written confessions, top-secret state files,
diary excerpts, pieces of a secret chronicle - which together tell the
story of two lovers caught up in a dangerous and controversial
revolutionary movement which attempted to do away with the two-tiered
city of Venice: Leonardo da Vinci's architectural dream to segregate the
rich and the poor described in his Notebooks and realised in this novel.
At the centre of the narrative are two written confessions, one by a
young girl from an aristocratic family - Loredana Loredan Contarini -
who writes of her disastrous marriage to a sadomasochistic tyrant and
her subsequent involvement with a revolutionary Friar - himself the
second confessor. As both struggle to tell their tales and confess their
sins, we are shown around the city of Venice as it might have been in
the sixteenth-century and given pieces of a narrative which together
form an explosive whole. One of the world's foremost authorities on
the Italian Renaissance, Lauro Martines was born in Chicago, has a Ph. D
from Harvard University, but has lived in London since 1970. Until
recently, he commuted to Los Angeles, where he was Professor of European
History at the University of California. He and his wife, the novelist
Julia O'Faolain, lived for some years in Florence. His books include
Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, Power and Imagination:
City States in Renaissance Italy, Society and History in English
Renaissance Verse, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in
Historical Context, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the
Italian Renaissance, and April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the
Medici. This is his first novel.
