Antonella’s Wonderful Corpse

On February 12, 2004, halfway through the writing of the sequel to this novel, Cangrande’s body was exhumed. This was the second time the great man’s body was disinterred, the first having been in 1921 when the main intent was to find a rumored copy of Dante’s...

Sources

My sources were many and varied. The major ones were Barbara Tuchman’s A DISTANT MIRROR, Allison Cornish’s READING DANTE’S STARS, ASIMOV’S GUIDE TO SHAKESPEARE by Isaac Asimov, and a collection of differing versions of Romeo & Juliet (ironically...

Chapter 1 – Journey’s End pt. 1

The Road to Verona, the Same Night “Giotto’s O.” In the middle of a dream in which no one would let him sleep, it seemed to Pietro that the words were deliberately meant to annoy him. Almost unwillingly he dreamed of a rock, a paintbrush touching the rock, forming a...

Dates

Those who have studied Shakespeare’s sources will be critical of my choice of years. As I’ve stated earlier, Luigi da Porto, whose version of the story was penned in the early 16th Century, firmly places the events of the play between 1301 and 1304. This is during the...