There are several reasons why this story pleases me. It fills in a few deficiencies in MV. We never meet Giotto in the novel, though he’s referenced often enough. Nor do we spend much time in Padua. And while the rivalry between Carrara and Pietro has a nice arc, the rancor between Carrara and Antony is left untouched. Rightly, Antony blames Mari for the whole debacle over Gianozza, and that’s what plays out in the book. But the Paduan Marsilio played a large part in that drama, and Antony certainly would not have forgotten it.
But my favorite reason for bringing this story to light is the plethora of Paduan characters. While my novels naturally take place in and around Verona, Padua was one of Shakespeare’s favorite places to reference. Here I’m able to bring all those references together. Characters from Much Ado, Shrew, Merchant, and R&J all meet here. It was tempting to add Speed from 2Gents, but according to my own timeline the action of that show happens much later – in the 1330s at the earliest – so I decided against it.
Antony’s uncle is a necessity – in R&J there is an “old Capulet” who once joined Antony in crashing this wedding in a mask. Ludovico is dead by then, or else my whole planning is thrown out of whack. So I invented Arnaldo to fill the void. In fact, I created him for the second novel in the series, VOICE OF THE FALCONER, but I’m delighted to retroactively introduce him here.
Giotto finished painting the Scrovegni chapel in 1305, but there’s a blank space between 1314 and 1317 where he was wandering around a bit, and there’s evidence that he worked on the Basilica of San Antonio – though I haven’t been able to confirm the date of that work. Since that work no longer exists, the date will remain unknown, and thus can fit my story.
Of Giotto’s extant work, Scrovegni remains the highest praised and most visited. I first saw it in 1997, when I spent a single day of a six-month whirlwind tour of Europe in Padua. Afterwards, with some time on my hands and knowing I was about to audition for Petruchio when I returned to the States, I sat on a bridge overlooking the Bacchiglione and read through Shrew again.
Months later I landed the part, and it was in that production that I met my wife Jan.
So, in a way, Padua has been very lucky for me. As Petruchio says: “Padua affords nothing but what is kind.”
