Genre: Historical erotic fiction.
Subgenre: Renaissance erotic novel with elements of political intrigue, suspense, mystery, romantic adventure, and female coming-of-age and emancipation.
Setting: Renaissance Italy, primarily Rome, with subsequent stops in Lazio, Umbria, the Marche, and Romagna, ending in Ferrara.
Time of the action: 1501-1502, between December 1501 and early 1502.
Rome, December 1501. Lucrezia Borgia is twenty-one and preparing to leave the city to marry Alfonso d'Este, heir to the Duchy of Ferrara. She already has two marriages behind her, a painful widowhood, and a life spent under the scrutiny of men who have decided her alliances, marriages, and fate for her. Just as her trousseau is being inventoried and the papal court celebrates the impending union, Cesare Borgia entrusts her with an enigmatic gift: twelve precious ivory statuettes of women, housed in crystal cases and depicting deities of antiquity. Lucrezia must take them to Ferrara herself and keep them with her.
The apparent wedding gift soon reveals a far more unsettling significance. The figures display unusual details and symbols that are difficult to interpret, and they arouse excessive interest among ambassadors, cardinals, merchants, and men of power. Accompanying Lucrezia through this web of scrutiny and suspicion is Isabella d'Atri, a young Neapolitan widow of austere beauty, intelligent, reserved, and surprisingly free. An attraction develops between the two women, destined to change the way Lucrezia sees her own body, desire, and, above all, the possibility of choosing.
Through Isabella, Lucrezia also discovers the house on the Tiber belonging to Maddalena Foscari, a sophisticated Venetian woman who gathers aristocrats, diplomats, artists, courtesans, and prelates around her. Behind masks, conversations, and sensual encounters, this world seemingly devoted to pleasure conceals a sophisticated nexus of information, alliances, and rivalries. Here Lucrezia comes to understand that desire can be not only pleasure but also a language, a form of freedom, and an instrument of power.
Alongside Isabella, Ruggiero da Narni also enters her life: a captain associated with Cesare, wry, experienced, and far less simple than he appears. Amid attraction, jealousy, and complicity, Lucrezia begins to experience a freedom that stands in radical contrast to her public existence as the pope's daughter.
When someone begins to take an increasingly dangerous interest in the Twelve Venuses, the story becomes an intrigue involving surveillance, pursuits, clandestine encounters, and clues to decipher. A detour through the Sabina countryside, new acquaintances, and subsequent discoveries convince Lucrezia that the statuettes hold something capable of implicating very powerful figures.
As the wedding approaches, followed by the long journey to Ferrara, the young Borgia comes to understand, above all, that the decisive question concerns not only what the Venuses conceal but who has the right to determine the course of her life. For the first time, Lucrezia thus begins to transform herself from a valuable pawn in her family's politics into a woman capable of choosing her desires, alliances, secrets, and future.
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