Anne Rice - New Tales of the Vampires 02 - Vittorio

VITTORIO, THE VAMPIRE

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels.

Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing

story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at

his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor

and country pleasures—a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is

confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula,

the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of

vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more

enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds

himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue.

Against a backdrop of the wonders—both sacred and profane—and the beauty

and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic

legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

A Main Selection of the Literary Guild

VITTORIO, THE VAMPIRE

NEW TALES OF THE VAMPIRES

ANNE RICE

ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK • TORONTO 1999

DEDICATION BY ANNE RICE

This novel is dedicated to Stan, Christopher, Michele and Howard; to

Rosario and Patrice; to Pamela and Elaine; and to Niccolo.

This novel is dedicated by Vittorio to the people of Florence, Italy.

1

WHO I AM, WHY I WRITE, WHAT IS TO COME

WHEN I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my arms

the severed heads of my younger brother I and sister. They were quick still,

and mute, with big fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was

I that I could make no more of a sound than they could.

The dream came true.

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless,

beneath five centuries of time.

I am a vampire.

My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the

ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of

Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.

By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful, having

lived five hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even

the angels will attest to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be

cautious on that point.

I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven of the

Articulate, " that band of strange romantic vampires in and from the Southern

New World city of New Orleans who have regaled you already with so many

chronicles and tales.

I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as fiction. I

know nothing of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You

will find no new knowledge of them in these pages, not even, hereafter, a

mention.

I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of my own

beginnings—the fable of my making—and to cast this fragment of my life in book

form into the wide world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or

destined contact with their well-published volumes.

I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant

roaming and study, never provoking the slightest danger from my own kind, and

never arousing their knowledge or suspicions.

But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.

It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I believe I

have revelations within me which will be wholly original to you. Perhaps when

my book is finished and gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow

a character in that grand roman-fleuve begun by other vampires in San

Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I cannot know or care about it.

As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones of the

place where I was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and misshapen

among the thorny blackberry vines and fragrant smothering forests of oak and

chestnut trees, I am compelled to record what befell me, for it seems that I

may have suffered a fate very unlike that of any other vampire.

I do not always hang about this place.

On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city which for me is the

queen of all cities— Florence—which I loved from the very first moment I saw

it with a child's eyes in the years when Cosimo the Elder ran his powerful

Medici bank with his own hand, even though he was the richest man in Europe.

In the house of Cosimo de' Medici lived the great sculptor Donatello

making sculptures of marble and bronze, as well as painters and poets galore,

writers on magic and makers of music. The great Brunelleschi, who had made the

very dome of Florence's greatest church, was building yet another Cathedral

for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo was rebuilding not only the monastery

of San Marco but commencing the palazzo for Cosimo which would one day be

known to all the world as the Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo, men went all over

Europe seeking in dusty libraries long forgotten the classics of Greek and

Rome, which Cosimo's scholars would translate into our native Italian, the

language which Dante had boldly chosen many years before for his Divine

Comedy.

And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a mortal boy of destiny and

promise—yes, I myself saw—the great guests of the Council of Trent who had

come from far Byzantium to heal the breach between the Eastern and Western

church: Pope Eugenius IV of Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the

Emperor of the East himself, John VIII Paleologus. These great men I saw enter

the city in a terrible storm of bitter rain, but nevertheless with

indescribable glory, and these men I saw eat from Cosimo's table.

Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no history of the Medici.

But let me only say that anyone who tells you that they were scoundrels, these

great men, is a perfect idiot. It was the descendants of Cosimo who took care

of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and artists without count. And it was all

because a banker, a moneylender if you will, thought it splendid and good to

give beauty and magnificence to the city of Florence.

I'll come back to Cosimo at the right point, and only for a few brief

words, though I must confess I am having trouble being brief here on any

score, but for now let me say that Cosimo belongs to the living.

I have been in bed with the dead since 1450.

Now to tell how it began, but allow me one more preface.

Don't look here, please, for antique language. You will not find a rigid

fabricated English meant to conjure castle walls by stilted diction and

constricted vocabulary.

I shall tell my tale naturally and effectively, wallowing in words, for I

love them. And, being an immortal, I have devoured over four centuries of

English, from the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to the abrupt

and harshly evocative words of a Sylvester Stallone movie.

You'll find me flexible, daring, and now and then a shock. But what can I

do but draw upon the fullest descriptive power I can command, and mark that

English now is no more the language of one land, or even two or three or four,

but has become the language of all the modern world from the backwoods of

Tennessee to the most remote Celtic isles and down under to the teeming cities

of Australia and New Zealand.

I am Renaissance-born. Therefore I delve in all, and blend without

prejudice, and that some higher good pertains to what I do, I cannot doubt.

As for my native Italian, hear it softly when you say my name, Vittorio,

and breathe it like perfume from the other names which are sprinkled

throughout this text. It is, beneath all, a language so sweet as to make of

the English word "stone" three syllables: pi-ea-tra. There has never been a

gentler language on earth. I speak all other tongues with the Italian accent

you'll hear in the streets of Florence today.

And that my English-speaking victims find my blandishments so pretty,

accented as they are, and yield to my soft lustrous Italian pronunciations, is

a constant source of bliss for me.

But I am not happy.

Don't think so.

I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire was happy.

I have a brain as well as a heart, and there hovers about me an etheric

visage of myself, created most definitely by some Higher Power, and entangled

completely within the intangible weave of that etheric visage is what men call

a soul. I have such. No amount of blood can drown away its life and leave me

but a thriving revenant.

Okay. No problem. Yes, yes. Thank you!—as everybody in the entire world

can say in English. We're ready to begin.

Except I want to give you a quote from an obscure but wonderful writer,

Sheridan Le Fanu, a paragraph spoken in extreme angst by a haunted character

in one of his many exquisitely written ghost stories. This author, a native of

Dublin, died in 1873, but mark how fresh is this language, and how horrifying

the expression of the character Captain Barton in the story called "The

Familiar": Whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we

are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced,

that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world—a system whose workings

are generally in mercy hidden from us—a system which may be, and which is

sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure—I know . . . that there

is a God—a dreadful God—and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most

mysterious and stupendous—by agencies the most inexplicable and

terrific;—there is a spiritual system—great God, how I have been convinced!—a

system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I

am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!

What do you think of that?

I am myself rather mortally struck by it. I don't think I am prepared to

speak of our God as "dreadful" or our system as "malignant," but there seems

an eerie inescapable ring of truth to these words, written in fiction but

obviously with much emotion.

It matters to me because I suffer under a terrible curse, quite unique to

me, I think, as a vampire. That is, the others don't share it. But I think we

all—human, vampire, all of us who are sentient and can weep—we all suffer

under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is

nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do about the force and the lure of this

knowledge.

At the end, we can take this up again. See what you make of my story.

It's early evening here. The brave remnant of my father's highest tower

still rises boldly enough against the sweetly star-filled heavens for me to

see from the window the moonlighted hills and valleys of Tuscany, aye, even as

far as the twinkling sea below the mines of Carrara. I smell the flowering

green of the steep undiscovered country round where the irises of Tuscany

still break out in violent red or white in sunny beds, to be found by me in

the silky night.

And so embraced and protected, I write, ready for the moment when the full

yet ever obscure moon leaves me for the hideaway of clouds, to light the

candles that stand ready, some six, ensconced within the thick ruggedly worked

silver of the candelabra which once stood on my father's desk, in those days

when he was the old-style feudal lord of this mountain and all its villages,

and the firm ally in peace and war of the great city of Florence and its

unofficial ruler, when we were rich, fearless, curious and wondrously

contented.

Let me speak now of what has vanished.

2

MY SMALL MORTAL LIFE, THE BEAUTY OF FLORENCE, THE GLORY OF OUR SMALL

COURT— WHAT IS VANISHED

I WAS sixteen years old when I died. I have good height, thick brown hair

down to the shoulders, hazel eyes that I are far too vulnerable to behold,

giving me the appearance of an androgyne in a way, and a desirable narrow nose

with unremarkable nostrils, and a medium-sized mouth which is neither

voluptuous nor stingy. A beautiful boy for the time. I wouldn't be alive now

if I hadn't been.

That's the case with most vampires, no matter who says otherwise. Beauty

carries us to our doom. Or, to put it more accurately, we are made immortal by

those who cannot sever themselves from our charms.

I don't have a childish face, but I have an almost angelic one. My

eyebrows are strong, dark, high enough over my eyes to allow them entirely too

much luster. My forehead would be a little too high if it wasn't so straight,

and if I didn't have so much thick brown hair, making as it does a curly, wavy

frame for the whole picture. My chin is slightly too strong, too squared off

for the rest. I have a dimple in it.

My body is overmuscular, strong, broad-chested, my arms powerful, giving

an impression of manly power. This rather rescues my obdurate-looking jaw and

allows to me to pass for a full-fledged man, at least from a distance.

This well-developed physique I owe to tremendous practice with a heavy

battle sword in the last years of my life, and ferocious hunting with my

falcons in the mountains, up and down which I ran often on foot, though I had

already four horses of my own by that age, including one of that special

majestic breed made to support my weight when I wore my full suit of armor.

My armor is still buried beneath this tower. I never used it in battle.

Italy was seething with war in my time, but all of the battles of the

Florentines were being fought by mercenaries.

All my father had to do was declare his absolute loyalty to Cosimo, and

let no one representing the Holy Roman Empire, the Duke of Milan or the Pope

in Rome move troops through our mountain passes or stop in our villages.

We were out of the way. It was no problem. Enterprising ancestors had

built our castle three hundred years before. We went back to the time of the

Lombards, or those barbarians who had come down from the North into Italy, and

I think we had their blood in us. But who knows? Since the Fall of ancient

Rome, so many tribes had invaded Italy.

We had interesting pagan relics lying about; alien tombstones most ancient

were sometimes found in the fields, and funny little stone goddesses which the

peasants still cherished if we didn't confiscate them. Beneath our towers were

vaults that some said went back to the days even before the Birth of Christ,

and I know now that is true. These places belonged to the people known to

history as the Etruscans.

Our household, being of the old feudal style, scorning trade and requiring

of its men that they be bold and brave, was full of treasure acquired through

wars without count or record—that is, old silver and gold candelabra and

sconces, heavy chests of wood with Byzantine designs encrusted on them, the

usual Flemish tapestries, and tons of lace, and bed hangings hand-trimmed with

gilt and gems, and all of the most desirable finery.

My father, admiring the Medici as he did, bought up all kinds of luxury

items on his trips to Florence. There was little bare stone in any important

room, because flowered wool carpets covered all, and every hallway or alcove

had its own towering armoire filled with rattling, rusting battle dress of

heroes whose names nobody even remembered.

We were incalculably rich: this I had more or less overheard as a child,

and there was some hint that it had to do as much with valor in war as with

secret pagan treasure.

There had been centuries of course when our family had warred with other

hill towns and forts, when castle besieged castle and walls were ripped down

as soon as they were built, and out of the city of Florence had gone the ever

quarreling and murderous Guelfs and Ghibellines.

The old Commune of Florence had sent armies to tear down castles like ours

and reduce any threatening Lord to nothingness.

But that time was long over.

We had survived due to cleverness and good choices, and also because we

were much off to ourselves, in high craggy uninviting country, crowning a true

mountain, as this is where the Alps come down into Tuscany, and those castles

most near to us were abandoned ruins.

Our nearest neighbor did rule his own mountain enclave of villages in

loyalty to the Duke of Milan.

But he didn't bother with us or we him. It was a remote political matter.

Our walls were thirty feet high, immensely thick, older than the castle

and keeps, old indeed beyond anyone's most romantic tales and constantly being

thickened and repaired, and inside the compound there existed three little

villages busy with good vineyards that yielded marvelous red wine; prosperous

beehives; blackberries; and wheat and the like; with plenty of chickens and

cows; and enormous stables for our horses.

I never knew how many people labored in our little world. The house was

full of clerks who took care of such things, and very seldom did my father sit

in judgment on any sort of case himself or was there cause to go to the courts

of Florence.

Our church was the designated church for all the country round, so that

those few who lived in less protected little hamlets down the mountain— and

there were plenty—came to us for their baptisms, and marriages, and such, and

we had for long periods of time within our walls a Dominican priest who said

Mass for us every morning.

In olden times, the forest had been severely cut down on our mountain so

that no invading enemy could make his way up the slopes, but by my time no

such protection was necessary.

The woods had grown back full and sweet in some gullies and over old

paths, even as wild as it is now, and almost up to the walls. One could make

out clearly from our towers a dozen or so small towns descending to the

valleys, with their little quilts of tilled fields, orchards of olive trees

and vineyards. They were all under our governance and loyal to us. If there

had been any war they would have come running to our gates as their ancestors

had done, and rightly so.

There were market days, village festivals, saints' days, and a little

alchemy now and then, and occasionally even a local miracle. It was a good

land, ours.

Visiting clerics always stayed a long time. It wasn't uncommon to have two

or three priests in various towers of the castle or in the lower, newer, more

modern stone buildings.

I had been taken to Florence to be educated when I was very small, living

in deluxe and invigorating style in the palazzo of my mother's uncle, who died

before I was thirteen, and it was then— when the house was closed—that I was

brought home, with two elderly aunts, and after that only visited Florence on

occasion.

My father was still at heart an old-fashioned man, instinctively an

indomitable Lord, though he was content to keep his distance from the power

struggles of the capital, to have huge accounts in the Medici banks and to

live an old-style courtly life in his own domain, visiting Cosimo de' Medici

himself when he did journey into Florence on business.

But when it came to his son, my father wanted that I should be reared as a

prince, a padrone, a knight, and I had to learn all the skills and values of a

knight, and at thirteen, I could ride in full battle dress, my helmeted head

bowed, at full speed with my spear thrust towards the straw-filled target. I

had no difficulty with it. It was as much fun as hunting, or swimming in

mountain streams, or having horse races with the village boys. I took to it

without rebellion.

I was, however, a divided being. The mental part of me had been nourished

in Florence by excellent teachers of Latin, Greek, philosophy and theology,

and I had been deep into the boys' pageants and plays of the city, often

taking the leading parts in the dramas presented by my own Confraternity in my

uncle's house, and I knew how to solemnly portray the Biblical Isaac about to

be sacrificed by the obedient Abraham, as well as the charming Angel Gabriel

discovered by a suspicious St. Joseph with his Virgin Mary.

I pined for all that now and then, the books, the lectures in the

Cathedrals to which I'd listened with precocious interest, and the lovely

nights in my uncle's Florentine house when I'd fallen asleep to the sounds of

spectacular opera extravaganzas, my mind brim full of the dazzle of miraculous

figures swooping down on wires, lutes and drums playing wildly, dancers

frolicking almost like acrobats and voices soaring beautifully in unison.

It had been an easy childhood. And in the boys' Confraternity to which I

belonged, I'd met the poorer children of Florence, the sons of the merchants,

orphans and boys from the monasteries and schools, because that is the way it

was in my time for a landed Lord. You had to mix with the people.

I think I crept out of the house a lot as a small child, easily as much as

I slipped out of the castle later. I remember too much of the festivals and

saints' days and processions of Florence for a disciplined child to have seen.

I was too often slipping in and out of the crowd, looking at the spectacularly

decorated floats in honor of the saints, and marveling at the solemnity of

those in silent ranks who carried candles and walked very slowly as if they

were in a trance of devotion.

Yes, I must have been a scamp. I know I was. I went out by the kitchen. I

bribed the servants. I had too many friends who were out-and-out routies or

beasties. I got into mayhem and then ran home. We played ball games and had

battles in the piazzas, and the priests ran us off with switches and threats.

I was good and bad, but not ever really wicked.

When I died to this world, at the age of sixteen, I never looked on a

daylighted street again, not in Florence or anywhere. Well, I saw the best of

it, that I can say. I can envisage with no difficulty the spectacle of the

Feast of St. John, when every single solitary shop in Florence had to put out

front all of its costly wares, and monks and friars sang the sweetest hymns on

their way to the Cathedral to give thanks to God for the blessed prosperity of

the city.

I could go on. There is no end to the praise one can heap upon the

Florence of those times, for she was a city of men who worked at trades and

business yet made the greatest art, of sharp politicians and true raving

saints, of deep-souled poets and the most audacious scoundrels. I think

Florence knew many things by that time that would only much later be learnt in

France and England, and which are not known in some countries to this day. Two

things were true. Cosimo was the most powerful man in all the world. And the

people, and only the people, ruled Florence then and forever.

But back to the castle. I kept up my reading and studies at home,

switching from knight to scholar in a twinkling. If there was any shadow on my

life, it was that at sixteen I was old enough to go to a real university, and

I knew it, and I sort of wanted to do it, but then again, I was raising new

hawks, training them myself and hunting with them, and the country round was

irresistible.

By this age of sixteen, I was considered bookish by the clan of elder

kinsmen who gathered at the table every night, my parents' uncles mostly, and

all very much of a former time when "bankers had not run the world," who had

marvelous tales to tell of the Crusades, to which they had gone when they were

young, and of what they had seen at the fierce battle of Acre, or fighting on

the island of Cyprus or Rhodes, and what life had been like at sea, and in

many exotic ports where they had been the terror of the taverns and the

women.

My mother was spirited and beautiful, with brown hair and very green eyes,

and she adored country life, but she'd never known Florence except from the

inside of a convent. She thought there was something seriously wrong with me

that I wanted to read Dante's poetry and write so much of my own.

She lived for nothing but receiving guests in gracious style, seeing to it

that the floors were strewn with lavender and sweet-smelling herbs, and that

the wine was properly spiced, and she led the dance herself with a great-uncle

who was very good at it, because my father would have nothing to do with

dancing.

All this to me, after Florence, was rather tame and slow. Bring on the war

stories.

She must have been very young when she was married off to my father,

because she was with child on the night she died. And the child died with her.

I'll come to that quickly. Well, as quickly as I can. I'm not so good at being

quick.

My brother, Matteo, was four years younger than me, and an excellent

student, though he had not been sent off anywhere as yet (would that he had),

and my sister, Bartola, was born less than a year after me, so close in fact

that I think my father was rather ashamed of it.

I thought them both—Matteo and Bartola— the most lovely and interesting

people in the world. We had country fun and country freedom, running in the

woods, picking blackberries, sitting at the feet of gypsy storytellers before

they got caught and sent away. We loved one another. Matteo worshipped me too

much because I could outtalk our father. He didn't see our father's quiet

strength, or well-fashioned old manners. I was Matteo's real teacher in all

things, I suppose. As for Bartola, she was far too wild for my mother, who was

in an eternal state of shock over the state of Bartola's long hair, the hair

being all full of twigs and petals and leaves and dirt from the woods where

we'd been running.

Bartola was forced into plenty of embroidering, however; she knew her

songs, her poetry and prayers. She was too exquisite and too rich to be rushed

into anything she didn't want. My father adored her, and more than once in

very few words assured himself that I kept constant watch over her in all our

woodland wanderings. I did. I would have killed anyone who touched her!

Ah. This is too much for me! I didn't know how hard this was going to be!

Bartola. Kill anyone who touched her! And now nightmares descend, as if they

were winged spirits themselves, and threaten to shut out the tiny silent and

ever drifting lights of Heaven.

Let me return to my train of thought.

My mother I never really understood, and probably misjudged, because

everything seemed a matter of style and manners with her, and my father I

found to be hysterically self-satirical and always funny.

He was, beneath all his jokes and snide stories, actually rather cynical,

but at the same time kind; he saw through the pomp of others, and even his own

pretensions. He looked upon the human situation as hopeless. War was comic to

him, devoid of heroes and full of buffoons, and he would burst out laughing in

the middle of his uncles' harangues, or even in the middle of my poems when I

went on too long, and I don't think he ever deliberately spoke a civil word to

my mother.

He was a big man, clean shaven and longhaired, and he had beautiful long

tapering fingers, very unusual for his size, because all his elders had

thicker hands. I have the same hands myself. All the beautiful rings he wore

had belonged to his mother.

He dressed more sumptuously than he would have dared to do in Florence, in

regal velvet stitched with pearls, and wore massive cloaks lined in ermine.

His gloves were true gauntlets trimmed in fox, and he had large grave eyes,

more deep-set than mine, and full of mockery, disbelief and sarcasm.

He was never mean, however, to anyone.

His only modern affectation was that he liked to drink from fine goblets

of glass, rather than old cups of hardwood or gold or silver. And we had

plenty of sparkling glass always on our long supper table.

My mother always smiled when she said such things to him as "My Lord,

please get your feet off the table," or "I'll thank you not to touch me until

you've washed your greasy hands," or "Are you really coming into the house

like that?" But beneath her charming exterior, I think she hated him.

The one time I ever heard her raise her voice in anger, it was to declare

in no uncertain terms that half the children in our villages round had been

sired by him, and that she herself had buried some eight tiny infants who had

never lived to see the light, because he couldn't restrain himself any better

than a rampant stallion.

He was so amazed at this outburst—it was behind closed doors—that he

emerged from the bedchamber looking pale and shocked, and said to me, "You

know, Vittorio, your mother is nothing as stupid as I always thought. No, not

at all. As a matter of fact, she's just boring."

He would never under normal circumstances have said anything so unkind

about her. He was trembling.

As for her, when I tried to go in to her, she threw a silver pitcher at

me. I said, "But Mother, it's Vittorio!" and she threw herself into my arms.

She cried bitterly for fifteen minutes.

We said nothing during this time. We sat together in her small stone

bedroom, rather high up in the oldest tower of our house, with many pieces of

gilded furniture, both ancient and new, and then she wiped her eyes and said,

"He takes care of everyone, you know. He takes care of my aunts and my uncles,

you know. And where would they be if it weren't for him? And he's never denied

me anything."

She went rambling on in her smooth convent-modulated voice. "Look at this

house. It's filled with elders whose wisdom has been so good for you children,

and all this on account of your father, who is rich enough to have gone

anywhere, I suppose, but he is too kind. Only, Vittorio! Vittorio, don't... I

mean ... with the girls in the village."

I almost said, in a spasm of desire to comfort her, that I had only

fathered one bastard to my knowledge, and he was just fine, when I realized

this would have been a perfect disaster. I said nothing.

That might have been the only conversation I ever had with my mother. But

it's not really a conversation because I didn't say anything.

She was right, however. Three of her aunts and two of her uncles lived

with us in our great high-walled compound, and these old people lived well,

always sumptuously dressed in the latest fabrics from the city, and enjoying

the purest courtly life imaginable. I couldn't help but benefit from listening

to them all the time, which I did, and they knew plenty of all the world.

It was the same with my father's uncles, but of course it was their land,

this, their family's, and so they felt more entitled, I assume, as they had

done most of the heroic fighting in the Holy Land, or so it seemed, and they

quarreled with my father over anything and everything, from the taste of the

meat tarts served at supper to the distractingly modern style of the painters

he hired from Florence to decorate our little chapel.

That was another sort of modern thing he did, the matter of the painters,

maybe the only modern thing other than liking things made of glass.

Our little chapel had for centuries been bare. It was, like the four

towers of our castle and all the walls around, built of a blond stone which is

common in Northern Tuscany. This is not the dark stone you see so much in

Florence, which is gray and looks perpetually unclean. This northern stone is

almost the color of the palest pink roses.

But my father had brought pupils up from Florence when I was very young,

good painters who had studied with Piero della Francesca and other such, to

cover these chapel walls with murals taken from the lovely stories of saints

and Biblical giants in the books known as The Golden Legend.

Anne Rice - New Tales of the Vampires 02 - Vittorio

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