Irish author Katherine Mezzacappa is a Carrara-living writer whose latest work, The Maiden of Florence (published by Fairlight in April 2024) is based on the true tale of Giulia Albizzi, a girl abused by those in power for political means.
The story stems from the disturbing fact that in 1584, the 20-year-old Giulia was abused in order to give proof that Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir to the dukedom of Mantua, was capable of deflowering a virgin, so that his future bride would be reassured following the failure of his first marriage, a task carried out with the blessing of the Holy Church. Katherine came across this unsettling information by chance.
“I was waiting for my son Tommaso while he was at an appointment, and I was going to be there quite a long time. I saw this stack of magazines, and there was a medical journal with an article about erectile dysfunction, and I decided to read that. To the side of the article, there was this little column, with literally nothing more than a mention of this girl and a ‘Decameron-esque’ tale in which a husband was found for her and given a dowry of 3,000 scudi. I felt that Giulia needed to have her tale told. I wanted to give her some sort of justice.”
The brutal cruelty of Giulia’s exploitation and her heart-wrenching years spent in an orphanage in Florence are told in, at times, uncomfortable detail, which Mezzacappa does so intentionally. “I did get criticism from some reviewers that ‘We don’t need to keep hearing about these assaults’ and I thought, well, actually you do, because if I don’t include them, we’re pretending that these things didn’t happen to her. Of course, each reader can make the choice whether this book is for them or not. From the first page, it’s clear that this book is about something pretty shocking. And it was also regarded by educated Florentines at the time as something shocking. There was only one account that I read that openly opposed it. It was the Bishop of Casale Monferrato who said, ‘We are advancing a rape as an affair of state’. The story comes up at different times down the centuries, but it’s mostly played for laughs when there’s nothing funny about it.”
The first work under her own name, Katherine is also the author of four historical novels under the pen name Katie Hutton, as well as a number of short romances as Kate Zarrelli. With former careers as a management consultant, translator, museum curator, library assistant, history of art lecturer, sewing machinist and geriatric care assistant, Katherine now dedicates her time to her work as a writer, her part-time job as a management consultant and her role as a manuscript assessor. She still finds time to volunteer with a second-hand book charity, of which she is a founder member.
Living between the Apuan Alps and the Tyrrhenian Sea for the past 18 years, Katherine moved there with her Italian husband and two sons when they were small, but her relationship with Florence dates even further back than that. “I grew up in the Boondocks and then in Belfast at the time of the Troubles. By April 1974, we knew that we were going to leave Ireland and live in Edinburgh. My mum said that she wanted to visit Italy before we moved, and said that she’d take me. It was wonderful. It was a very different Florence then. There were Italian children begging outside churches, an image that remained in my mind. Florence was a revelation. It wasn’t crowded, so you were never having to queue, but there was also the aftermath of the floods, and you got a real feel for the loss of that.” When asked about her favourite place in Florence, Katherine had several suggestions. “San Miniato. I love the integrity of that building. I also love the quiet Horne Museum, especially the little forks in the kitchen right at the top. Palazzo Davanzati is also a place that greatly informed the setting of my book, except I moved it to the lungarno.”
When it comes to researching historical fiction, Katherine is a firm believer in the value of reading the writing of the period. “Writing a historical novel is like an iceberg. The more you read, the more you realize you still have to read. When writing any of my books, I read a lot of what was being written at the time. For example, when I wrote one of the sagas set in the 1930s, I read a lot of Agatha Christie because of her turn of phrase and the subtle references she makes. This job here was a little bit different in the sense that I was having to read a lot of stuff and then translate it, but it’s important to get the voice.”
Our Florence-familiar readers will be intrigued by the references to the Innocenti Museum and the devastating tokens mothers left with their children in the hope that they could one day reclaim them. The dark attitude towards orphans is also evidenced. “There’s an account of Vinta, the grand-duke’s most senior minister who was tasked with finding a suitable girl amongst Florence’s many orphanages. When he went to the Innocenti, he said that the girls were ‘disgusting’, and that they had scabies.” Extensive research was also carried out at Prato’s textile museum, given that the orphans would have been occupied with silk-weaving.
There was even an unexpected discovery that proved fundamental to the book’s development. “I was researching at the Kunsthistorisches Institut and came across information that Giulia had been in the Pietà, another orphanage that was previously housed on the site. I hadn’t realized that’s what it had been. I also managed to get my hands on the entire correspondence of this marriage contract, housed at the Medici Archive, and fought through the Renaissance Italian. I would read them and think, ‘did that actually happen?’ It was so explicit.”
A principal motive for writing the book was so that a voice could be given to a woman denied a voice by history. However, we also receive her husband’s perspective. “The second part of the story switches to Giuliano’s point of view because he would have had more agency to move around and so was a tool to tell other sides of the story. This part of the book is fiction that I invented on the basis of trying to give Giulia some sort of happy ending, even though nobody can. I suppose I also wrote it so that we could be more aware of what the city is built on. There’s a poem by Brecht called ‘The reading workman’, in which a labourer asks questions about who built the pyramids and so on, highlighting that we don’t talk about these people’s stories. I wanted to give a voice to someone who didn’t have a voice. In a way, that’s kind of a theme in all of my historical fiction. The thing is, I don’t know if I have given her justice because we can’t think like people did at the time. The whole world view is conditioned differently, but I’ve done what I can.”
