Loredana
A Venetian Tale
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A dark, riveting tale of love, politics, and religion in sixteenth-century Venice--the embodiment of Leonardo da Vinci's ideal city.
In early sixteenth-century Italy, two lovers, Loredana and Orso, seem ready to die rather than be separated. Their tale unfolds in the two-tiered city of Venice, where the nobility have the upper tier and the light of the sun, while the common people, with their manual trades, occupy the lower city--the dark tier in the shadows. Violating social and religious taboos, the passion of the lovers bridges the two cities.
A beautiful young widow, Loredana, dreads the cruel judgment of her family, one of the most powerful houses in republican Venice. Orso--a Dominican friar, mystic, and revolutionary--is in hiding, as the Venetian secret police scour the upper and lower cities for him. When the authorities close in, guardsmen control all streets and waterways, and the two lovers are driven to write out their penitential confessions, unable to reach the one priest who would not betray them.
Conjuring up the voices of lovers and of their age through a rich array of letters, confessions, secret-police proceedings, a diary, and a family chronicle, this is an astonishing take of politics, love, lust, and religious incandescence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vivid written confessions of a lustful young widow, the eponymous Loredana, and Orso, a Dominican friar with a liberal interpretation of his ecclesiastic vows, are the backbone of this engrossing tale set during the intrigues of Renaissance Venice's Council of Ten. Although the epistolary form can be a cumbersome means of novelistic expression, it is one Martines skillfully manipulates, bringing to life the opulence and grandeur and the rigid social strata and dark political schemes of la Serenissima. High-born Loredana begins her lengthy written confession with a chronicle of her disastrous marriage to the abusive Marco, who'd rather have his male lovers seduce her than touch her himself. Orso's confessions (also to Father Clemente) are interspersed; their revelations include his desire for a new Venice, in which the poor would not be kept in filth and darkness while the rich dine sumptuously in sun-filled palazzos. When Loredana returns to her father's home, she begins a life of study and introspection and then meets Orso. Diary entries by others involved reveal the scandal that the union between Orso and Loredana causes in Venice, which brings the full force of a holy inquisition upon them. Martines's background as a scholar of the Italian Renaissance serves him well in this delicious page-turner of politics and lust.
