Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all.
This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing th...
A young woman seeks sanctuary with us. It is not for us to deny her that right. Tell His Holiness that we will protect her with our lives and care for her until she is ready to leave. Not even Alexand...
Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.
In the chaos of war, I would have looked simply small, and therefore neither a promise nor a threat.
And, such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for me.
Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister. Now, when [Pedro Calderon] shuts his eyes, he cannot see anything else.
Any man in love with Cesare is already half in love with his sister.
As the last chimes die away, a series of contorted male shrieks rise up from somewhere nearby; a late coupling between the sheets or a few early knife thrusts into a belly? He smiles. Such are the sou...
Birth, coupling, death. The more she thinks about it, the more it seems that that is all there is: a wheel turning over and over, moving so fast that sometimes you cannot even make out the spokes. It...
Borgia bastard could never be the social equal of a legitimate Medici.
There is a kind of comfort to be gained from the passing of time, hour upon hour, day upon day, time falling like thick flakes of snow, the next laid upon the last, again and again, until what has bee...
Either you’re standing under your haloes, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which one they prefer. The best you can do is...
Either you’re standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choos...
Everyone that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted And she had tried, truly and honestly, tried so hard that sometimes, despite the nun’s kindness and patie...
Uncertainty is more contagious than the plague. Cesare,
Together he [Girolamo Savonarola] and his archenemy Lorenzo [de' Medici] would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, the...
What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
He spends the night in prayer. God’s voice, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, tells him what the politician in him already knows: that whatever he might stand to gain from playing one ag...
No one bothered dressing up in priests’ robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn’t rich enough.
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