The Birth of Venus, by Sarah Dunant, might have been tailored for me.
It has location, Florence, Italy, it takes place in the late 1400's, it has drama, sex, art, love and some very bizarre behavior.
It also features religious fervor, taking place at a time when the fundamentalist priest Savonarola and his night police held the formerly liberal city in thrall. There's also mystery; dead, mutilated bodies start appearing in the streets.
It is the story of Alessandra Cecchi is the young daughter of a textile merchant and his wife, priviledged and educated. She becomes fascinated by the artist her father hires to paint their chapel. She is interested in art herself, and has a collection of drawings, but it is considered unseemly for a woman to paint...or be educated...or on the streets by herself. For all her limitations, she manages to get around, though not without a few encounters with the street patrols.
We also see the world from the vantage of her two brothers, the gadabout Tomaso and the mulish Luca, and her sister, Plautila, who marries early and is blissfully content in her role of wife and mother. Not so for Alessandra who is married at 15 to a much older man who she barely knows.
This story is both the story of a personal journey, or the story of a period of high drama in a beautiful, mysterious and ancient city. Either way, it intrigues. While there some major plots, it is the series of subplots that leads Alessandra to the convent where we find her in the prologue that are the meat of the novel.
You don't keep reading because you want to see how it ends, rather because each chapter is a fascinating nugget; because it is so well written that reading it is a pleasure in itself. And, okay, to find out how the heck Alessandra wound up in the convent, and how the heck she got that tatoo.
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