LUCREZIA BORGIA

Maria Bellonci's LUCREZIA BORGIA is both a novel and a biography of the life of Lucrezia Borgia - an Italian noblewoman, the illegitimate daughter and third child of Pope Alexander VI and Vannozza Cattanei, and one of the most controversial female figures of the Italian Renaissance - from the time of Pope Borgia's election in 1492 until her death in 1519.

With a new, unscholarly style that delves into the Italian courts of the Renaissance, Maria Bellonci overturns the historians' image of Lucrezia Borgia and brings out her most human aspect, her intelligence and grace along with the willingness to realize her ambitions. Through Bellonci's pen, Lucrezia is portraited as a woman who fights to express herself in a world of contradictions, struggles and betrayals. There is no truth and verisimilitude, no literary fiction, just the lucid portrait of a woman's humanity and personality. Lucrezia Borgia was awarded the Viareggio Prize in 1939 and was originally translated in 12 languages. Maria Bellonci (1902-1986) was a complex and refined author, whose talent as a storyteller is always intertwined with her historical skills, Maria Bellonci was an Italian novelist, journalist and translator (Stendhal, Zola) and the founder of Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize. Her works, such as Lucrezia Borgia and Rinascimento privato, were always based on extensive and detailed research and have been praised for the psychological characterization and their vivid reconstructions, like in Hilary Mantel's novels, which provide the audience with a comprehensive account of History, stripped of the legends of the past. She always nurtured an interest in women's destinies, and in particular in women's right to intellectual affirmation, and her novels focus on the great families of the Renaissance: the Borgias, the Este, the Gonzagas, and the Sforzas.