A novel of beauty and inspiration set in Renaissance Florence about a young and defiant female artist searching for her mother
Florence, 1500-a city that glitters with wealth and artistic genius is also a place of fierce political intrigue, walled off from the unrest in the surrounding Tuscan countryside. In this moment, a peasant girl finds herself alone after her father is killed and her mother disappears. Young Beatrice must dare to enter the city to sell her family's olive oil in order to survive, but also to search the streets and opium dens for her missing, grieving mother.
Walking barefoot from her outlying village, Beatrice is given grudging permission to pass through the city gates to sell olive oil to the artists-Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli-who toil to elevate the status of the Florentine Republic. Lonely yet defiant, the peasant girl draws on the stone walls of Florence in secret as a way to express...