Bomarzo

As sumptuous, dazzling, corrupt and gorgeous as the 16th-century Italian Renaissance in which it is set, Bomarzo is the story of Pier Francesco Orsini, the hunchbacked, ruthless, but vulnerable Duke of Bomarzo, ancient fortress in the mountains outside Rome. The despised son of a family of warriors, throughout his youth Orsini endured his father's contempt and the taunts and torments of his heroic brothers, feeding his soul with visions of revenge and dreams of the sensual beauty and love denied him, preparing himself for a typically Renaissance combination of art and murder. A friend of Cellini's, a contemporary of Michelangelo's, an associate and relative of the great Italian families—De Medici, Farnese, Colonna—Orsini, as he comes of age, destroys his brothers and grasps his father's title, embroiling himself in Tuscan feuds and alliances as the great families fight over the papacy and combine to support or resist the invasion of Charles V. Yet even as Orsini plunges into the violence of plot and counterplot, of sexual liaisons and marriages for power or lust, he creates a monumental work of art on his castle's grounds, a fabulous Wood of Monsters, still standing in the hills, vast sculptures cut into limestone, figures that spring from his deepest obsessions, the mythical flowering of his dreams and desires. Throughout, in unforgettable detail, all the color and richness of the Italian Renaissance is revealed: princes and harlots, courtesans and cardinals, alchemists, artists, and artisans, emperors, assassins and scholars proceeding to festivities, coronations, weddings, journeys, battles and sieges from the plains of Picardy to the sea-borne conflagration at Lepanto. With a combination of scenic and historical description and modern psychological complexity and atmospheric sensitivity, Mujica Laínez has created a miracle of historical literature.