A Venetian Tale

Loredana

A riveting novel of politics and passion, love and lust, in sixteenth-century Venice, written by one of our most distinguished historians.

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.

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.

April Blood

'Wonderfully readable...has the ingredients of a Mafia thriller' Daily Telegraph

A spine-chilling political drama of conspiracy, murder and bloody revenge

A riveting tale in which we can recognise analogies with our own world

Sheds light on the whole apparatus of political powering Renaissance Florence

Elegant and incisive...a masterful reconstruction

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 been living in London since 1970. Until recently he communted 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 best known books include Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (1968), Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (1985), An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in Historical Context (1994), Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (2001), and Power and Imagination, now available in Pimlico.

In April 1478, a plot to murder the two heads of the powerful Medici family dramatically miscarried. The younger of the two brothers was killed, but Lorenzo the Magnificent, the brilliant poet and connoisseur escaped. A bloodbath followed and all of Italy was at once affected as it emerged that the Pope, the King of Naples, and the Duke of Urbino were deeply implicated in the plot, and that binding treaties required Milan and Venice to assist Florence. 
 
If the conspirators had succeeded and Lorenzo had been killed the future of the Medici family and, indeed, of the Florentine state would have been utterly transformed.

Lauro Martines

A vivid account of the battle cry for a city's soul.

Outstanding... The concluding pages of this book are the best distillation I have yet read of the authentic Florentine Renaissance ethos.

A thoroughly good read that is also reliable history... impressive narrative power.

Martines paints a rich and fascinating portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who ruled Florence after the fall of the Medicis. Enraged by church corruption, he led a Florentine council for 20 years - until his enemies burned him at the stake in 1498.

Lauro Martines is one of our most renowned historians of the Italian Renaissance and of Florence in particular. His new book is, in some ways, a successor to April Blood... Together the two volumes make up an engrossing study of society and politics during the Tuscan city's most illustrious half century.

A sympathetic biography of someone not generally considered to be a sympathetic man... Martines knows the personalities of everyone involved as vividly as he knows his own neighbours.  He uses this expertise sparingly, judiciously using light and shade where it is required.

As one might expect from the author of such a classic as Power and Imagination and the study of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici, April Blood, Martines is particularly good at taking the reader through the ins and outs of Florentine politics. But he is also skilful in showing how the real drama was perhaps not the story of the friar's brief conversion of Florence, but that of the city's 'conquest' of Savonarola.

Martines's command of his historical material is not in doubt, and, like the humanists he so greatly admires, he assiduously unpacks the rhetorical interplay of language, religion and high politics that defines Savonarola's story.

Savonarola and Renaissance Italy

When the King of France invaded Italy in 1494, princely states would fall, sending tremors up and down the peninsula. The Medici fled from Florence; the republic sprang back to life; and the French army, occupying the Renaissance city for ten terrifying days, stood on the verge of sacking it. A 'little friar' from Ferrara, Savonarola was alone in knowing how to comfort citizens with his sermons and in urging the King to get out of Florence. 
 
Although the French left a city riven by political factions, the Friar's popular 'party' swiftly prevailed. With Florence at the height of its Renaissance glories, his voice rose above those of all other men. Claiming to be a messenger from God, he attacked evils on all sides - a mercenary Church, the despotism of the Medici, vile political elites, and Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, whose name itself was a byword for brazen corruption. Savonarola foretold a universal 'scourging', but made pleas, above all, for the renewal of Christianity and for the political voice of the people. His struggle turned into a battle for the 'soul' of Florence. 
 
Excommunicated and silenced, Savonarola spurned Rome and began to preach again, retaining the strong support of the city republic. As the Pope and Medicean conspirators closed in on him, five prominent Florentines were beheaded for plotting against the state, further inflaming the passions already rife in the city. After an abortive trial by fire to shame and discredit him, his enemies set siege to his convent, leading to his arrest and trial on trumped-up charges of heresy. 
 
Savonarola mingled the fervour of religion with the ardour of republican politics. Scourge and Fire is the story of his impact on Florence and of the city's spell over him.

Lauro Martines

Praise for Scourge and Fire

A vivid account of the battle cry for a city's soul.

A strong and compelling narrative

Outstanding... The concluding pages of this book are the best distillation I have yet read of the authentic Florentine Renaissance ethos.

A vivid account of the battle cry for a city's soul.

A strong and compelling narrative

Outstanding... The concluding pages of this book are the best distillation I have yet read of the authentic Florentine Renaissance ethos.

A vivid account of the battle cry for a city's soul.

A strong and compelling narrative

Outstanding... The concluding pages of this book are the best distillation I have yet read of the authentic Florentine Renaissance ethos.

Books by Lauro Martines

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