num_pages: 96
description: Doctor Blake hit accidentally by a Florentine bus is trying to write a letter to his sister about his hospitalization and a vivid dream he has been having since being injured, when he slips back into the dream again. His transition into the fifteenth century opens on a bench in the Piazza Strozzi where upon his awakening there he experiences in a dream state, an imagined life of Vespasiano da Bisticci from youth and ultimately to old age. Vespo and his best friend Mario experience the active and contemplative lives in a flurry of adventures in battles, meeting some of the major political and artistic personalities in fifteenth century Florence, meeting and becoming involved with women, one of who becomes significant to the history of the Italian Renaissance. This story is a gripping and revealing story about life in a late medieval-early Renaissance city, the history of which became the foundation of modern thinking, art and science. To the informed reader, the players are real, and likewise the relevance of the tribulations of the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. This book is written as a screenplay rather than as a novel to emphasize the power of visual images so important to the Florentines. Conventional symbols of the past yield to a new image of reality and the human condition in this critical time in history so faithfully recorded in Vespasiano da Bisticci's Lives of the Most Eminent Men of the Fifteenth Century.
language: English
title: The Red Lily
titlecomplete: The Red Lily
publisher: Authorhouse