Renaissance Italy Fiction

This is a performance of the very first English translation of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince. This translation, published by Edward Dacres, first appeared in 1640. Machiavelli's original Italian edition was printed in 1532, five years after his death. Due to the evil associated with Machiavelli's book, it took 108 years for The Prince to be published in the English language.

Florence. Spring, 1537. When Cesare Aldo investigates a report of intruders at a convent in the Renaissance city’s northern quarter, he enters a community divided by bitter rivalries and harbouring dark secrets. His case becomes far more complicated when a naked man’s body is found deep inside the convent, stabbed more than two dozen times. Unthinkable as it seems, all the evidence suggests one of the nuns must be the killer. Meanwhile, Constable Carlo Strocchi finds human remains pulled from the Arno that belong to an officer of the law missing since winter.

A secret diary. A forbidden love. A centuries-old mystery to solve. When a rare 16th-century manuscript lands on her desk, courtesy of William, a struggling painter, shy book restorer Rose makes a startling discovery: it is a palimpsest. Beneath the text is a different document, one that's been written over. What they discover is the secret diary of William's ancestor Giovanni Lomazzo, a Venetian painter who has just been commissioned by Venice's most powerful admiral to paint a portrait of his favourite courtesan....