Venice series by Roberto Tiraboschi
Requirements: Epub reader, 4.21 Mb
Overview: Roberto Tiraboschi was born in Bergamo (Italy) and lives between Rome and Venice. A screenwriter and playwright, he has worked with Nobel laureate Dario Fo and written screenplays for Italian directors, including Marco Pontecorvo, Silvio Soldini, and Liliana Cavani, among others. His novels, Sonno and Sguardo 11, have enjoyed critical and commercial success in Italy. The Eye Stone is the first of his novels to be published in English.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Thriller
1. The Eye Stone
In the twelfth century AD, Venice is little more than an agglomeration of small islands snatched from the muddy tides. The magnificent city-lagoon of Venice, the rich and powerful Serene Republic, is yet to be born. Here, in this northern backwater, a group of artisans have proven themselves to be unrivalled in an art form that produces works of such astounding beauty that many consider it mystical in nature and think its practitioners possessed of otherworldly gifts. They are glassmakers. Presciently aware of the power they wield and the role they will play in the Venice of the future, the Venetian glassmakers inhabit a world of esoteric practices and secret knowledge that they protect at all costs.
Into this world steps Edgardo D’Arduino, a cleric and a professional copyist. Edgardo’s eyesight has begun to waver—a curse for a man who makes his living copying sacred texts. But he has heard stories, perhaps legends, that in Venice, city of glassmakers, there exists a stone, the lapides ad legendum, that can restore one’s sight. However, finding men who have knowledge of this wondrous stone proves almost impossible. After much searching, Edgardo meets a mysterious man who offers him a deal: he will lead him to the makers of the lapides ad legendum in exchange for Edgardo’s stealing a secret Arabic scientific text that is kept in the abbey where Edgardo lodges. When a series of horrific crimes shakes the cloistered world of the glassmakers, Edgardo realizes that there is much more at stake than his faltering eyesight.
2. The Apothecary’s Shop
In a medieval Venice ravaged by famine and orgiastic revelries, the protagonists of The Apothecary’s Shop explore the depths of the city and the paths to the supernatural in their search for a missing child.
The young Costanza, of the noble Grimani family, has disappeared. Edgardo, the family scribe, vows to return the girl to her family, an ambitious enterprise considering his failing eyesight. Physical ailments and emotional torment hinder Edgardo’s search, for as he undertakes this perilous investigation, images of his own lost love—Kallis, a slave from the Far East who disappeared in a storm years ago—are resurrected. Help arrives in the form of Abella, the only female doctor in Venice. From her, Edgardo learns of occult medical practices and of Sabbatai’s Apothecary, where the city’s most desperate citizens seek heretical remedies and concoctions to sooth their suffering. It is here, however, where the secret of Constanza’s disappearance may lie.
Venal physicians and legitimate healers, unscrupulous relatives, mystics and apothecaries, wealthy nobility and the wretched poor, undertakers, Eastern merchants, African slave traders, each plays a role this ingeniously constructed mystery set in the busy and licentious trade port of Venice.
The Apothecary’s Shop is an erudite literary thriller in the vein of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and takes readers on an astonishing voyage into a city both distant yet familiar.
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The Eye Stone
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