In 'Three Fires', Denise Mina re-imagines the "Bonfire of the Vanities, a series of fires lit throughout Florence at the end of the 15th century - inspired by the fanatical Girolamo Savonarola, a friar and anti-corruption campaigner. In dramatizing the life of Savonarola, Mina explores the downfall of the original architect of cancel culture and, in the process, explores the never-ending tensions between wealth, inequality, and freedom of speech that...

Renaissance is a word with hope infused in every letter. Since she was a child, Meg has dreamed of taking a promised trip to Florence, Italy, and being able to finally step into the place captured in a picture at her grandmothers house. But after her grandmother passes away and it falls to her less-than-reliable father to take her instead, Megs long-anticipated travel plans seem permanently on hold. When her dad finally tells Meg to book the trip,...

"In 1903, tensions between Britain and Germany are starting to loom over Europe, something that has not gone unnoticed by Lady Emily and her husband, Colin Hargreaves. An agent of the Crown, Colin carries the weight of the Empire, but his focus is drawn to Italy by a series of burglaries at his daughter's palazzo in Florence--burglaries that might have international ramifications. He and Emily travel to Tuscany where, soon after their arrival, a stranger...

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florence palazzo. A child of the Renaissance with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the artist's abilities. But Alessandra's parents have made plans for their daughter, and she is soon married off to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile,...

Working as an artist's apprentice in Renaissance Florence, thirteen-year-old Arduino makes a discovery which may cost him the chance to become a painter.

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of Vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of a Vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. Vittorio, educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, inhabits a world of courtly splendor & country splendor & country pleasures-a world suddenly shattered when his entire family is destroyed...