Talking Location with author Linda Cardillo – Italy

26th January 2019

#TalkingLocationWith author Linda Cardillo – Italy, the setting for Love That Moves The Sun: Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo Buonarroti

Because it is the birthplace of my grandparents and the source of my heritage, Italy has always occupied a special corner of my heart. My decision to write historical fiction had its roots in my love for and fascination with my family’s ancestral home and the richness of its history and landscape. I remember vividly when my grandmother and her sisters made a trip back to their village in the hills of Campania east of Naples. Elegantly dressed for the journey, they posed on the pier before boarding the Leonardo da Vinci, retracing in reverse the journey they had made 50 years earlier as teenagers arriving to join their older brother in the new world. One could not mistake the expressions of longing on their faces. It was not many years after that when I made my first trip to Italy, carrying a backpack instead of a monogramed trunk and wearing jeans instead of a hat and gloves.

Since that first journey, I’ve travelled several times to Italy, including a summer-long sojourn living and studying in Florence. But no trips have had more of an impact on me than my last two, undertaken specifically to immerse myself in the cultural and geographical environments that formed the characters of my most recent novel, Love That Moves the Sun.

Vittoria Colonna, a celebrated sixteenth-century poet, was Roman by birth and lived many years on Ischia, a volcanic island eighteen miles west of Naples in the Tyrrhenian Sea, until she returned to her Roman roots. Michelangelo Buonarroti, the consummate artist, sculptor and poet, was a native of Florence but spent the last thirty years of his life in Rome. It was in Rome that Vittoria and Michelangelo met and formed an extraordinary bond, united in pursuit of a spiritual redemption that fueled their art and sparked their love for one another.

My first trip to Ischia was on a shimmering August day, travelling on a hydrofoil out of the Neapolitan port of Mergellina. I stood at the rail, waiting expectantly for a view of the iconic citadel rising atop the cliffs of the small island upon which the Castello Aragonese had been built in the 15thcentury. Seeing it for the first time took my breath away.

From the moment I disembarked onto the island and began the climb to the citadel, I felt as if I were ten-year-old Vittoria arriving for the first time, exiled by war. My initial steps took me through a narrow, dank tunnel carved out of volcanic rock and sealed from the sea and potential enemies by a series of heavy wooden doors.

When we emerged from the tunnel into the open air, I felt the heat and brilliance of the sun, heard the waves lapping at the rocky beach far below and saw the vividly colored oleander spilling over the stone walls. Along the way I tasted a fig from a gnarled tree hanging over the path. Every step brought me closer to an understanding of how this isolated, beautiful rock had shaped the woman and poet who was Vittoria Colonna.

The journey was an extraordinary privilege, a departure from the dusty volumes of history that had been the source of my research up until that moment and an opportunity to walk in Vittoria’s footsteps and observe the vistas that had surrounded her.

My second trip took me to Rome, where the Colonna family still resides in the Colonna palace, and the Basilica of St. John Lateran houses a Colonna chapel. Although Vittoria did not live in the palace, she spent time as a guest there, particularly during the coronation of Pope Leo X, which took place in the Basilica.  She also served as her brother’s hostess at the palace during a ceremonial visit of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

The opulence and formality of the palace and its location in the heart of the city was a sharp contrast to the Castello on Ischia, which was a fortress surrounded by the expansive panorama of sky and sea.

The Colonna family is closely associated with the Basilica of St. John Lateran. In addition to the Colonna Chapel, several images of the Colonna seal, a white column on a red field, are imbedded in the floor of the nave.

My final stop in Rome was the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel in particular. It was the Sistine altar wall that brought Vittoria Colonna and together. He was painting the Last Judgment, and he turned to her to interpret its Scriptural basis. Their collaboration on the wall led to a deep friendship that sustained them until her death in 1547.

Linda Cardillo is an award-winning author who writes about the old country and the new, the tangle and embrace of family, and finding courage in the midst of loss. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “Fresh Face,” Linda has built a loyal following with her works of fiction—the novels Dancing on Sunday Afternoons, Across the Table, The Boat House Café, The Uneven Road, and Island Legacy, as well as novellas in the anthologies The Valentine Gift and A Mother’s Heart and the illustrated children’s book The Smallest Christmas Tree. Her newest book, Love That Moves the Sun, is a work of historical fiction set in the Italian Renaissance and based on the relationship between the poet Vittoria Colonna and the artist Michelangelo.

Catch Linda on Twitter and connect via her website. You can buy her book on this link

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