Autrice
Presentazione | Biografia
I
was born in Milan, at noon on a sultry day many years ago. I studied, without infamy or praise, at the classical high school “G. Berchet”. Then, finally free to devote myself to my true passion, I went to university where, between one demonstration and the next (it was the years between 1969 and 1972), I graduated in History of Art Criticism with a thesis on Italian advertisement posters, a subject still almost totally ignored at the time. After various experiences in advertisement agencies and press offices, I decided to turn to journalism. For the next twenty years I wrote. I interviewed hundreds of important people involved in the art world, photography, and culture; I gave accounts of shows and important events in the Milanese cultural world; I wrote articles and essays about some of the most important religious and civil monuments in Milan. I have always tried to convey a lively image of the subjects I investigated, whether a famous illustrator or the history of a centuries old basilica. In the writing of my pieces, I carefully avoided the technical language which is so overly abused, preferring in its place a more direct, journalistic type of communication, capable of intriguing and involving the reader. Many of them appreciated this choice, maintaining that my sensibility for places and people got to them empathically and without filters. This strategy of communication made me want to explore other roads and so, with the presumption that is typical of recklessness, I tried to confront myself with what is maybe the most difficult genre, the novel. It took me three years to finish the first one, which was then miraculously published in less than six months (The Wool Merchant, Edizioni Piemme, 2001) and obtained immediate success, both with the public and with the critics.
A
t this point, even though very late in life and for this I can blame no one but myself, I understood that my true profession was writing. I immediately started another novel: another two years of work and The Lord of the Hawk (Edizioni Piemme, 2003) came out in the book stores, followed in 2006 by The English Monk (Rizzoli). All of my novels, including the latest, The Emperor’s Manuscript (Rizzoli, September 2008), take place in the mid 1200’s: the Middle Ages of townships, of fights between the Pope and the Emperor, of heresies, of the growth of travel and commerce, of the very first witch hunts. I couldn’t say why, upon reaching middle age, an interest in such a distant historical period was aroused in me: what I know for sure is that the study of the events of those years made me so curious and interested, that I became convinced that, even though many centuries had elapsed, not much has changed since then. People’s feelings are the same, their fears are similar, the causes that lead up to a war are alike…And it’s to these similarities that I look in tracing the features of my characters: without their Medieval dress, in many of them we could recognize our next door swindler, the inept, the enriched, the beggar, the leader.




M
y private life is perfectly linear. I have a husband who has shared love and hardships with me for the past thirty years, a daughter who is now a grown-up for whom I feel love and great respect. For seventeen years we were cheered by the presence of Skye, our poodle. When her life ended, we couldn’t bare the empty space caused by her departure and we adopted another one. She, too, is black, and her name is Kilda.