A Castle in Romagna
by Igor Štiks
Category: Fiction

Alternating between Renaissance Italy and Yugoslavia during the time of Tito, this novel tells two tales of love, intrigue, and betrayal. It is the summer of 1995, the war in Bosnia is raging, and the young Bosnian narrator is taking a tour of an Italian Renaissance castle. He soon finds himself caught up in the two tales of passion and intrigue that his Franciscan guide, a refugee like himself, relates. One is the story of Enzo Strecci, a Renaissance poet from Lombardy who has the ill fortune of falling in love with the wife of Francesco Mardi, his host and protector during a time of Hapsburg incursions and espionage. The other is the story of the Franciscan's own ill-fated passion for the local Communist police commander's daughter during Tito's rupture with Stalinism. Between Rimini, Italy, in 1535 and the Croatian island of Rab in 1948, lives and fates become intertwined, history repeats itself, and nostalgia for home proves itself to be bittersweet.