Volterra - Volterra in Popular Fiction

Volterra in Popular Fiction

  • Linda Proud's A Tabernacle for the Sun (2005), the first volume of The Botticelli Trilogy, begins with the sack of Volterra in 1472. Volterra is the ancestral home of the Maffei family and the events of 1472 lead directly to the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. The protagonist of the novel is Tommaso de' Maffei, half brother of one of the conspirators.
  • Volterra is an important location in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. In the books, Volterra is home to the Volturi, a coven of powerful and ancient vampires. (The movie, however, was shot in Montepulciano.)
  • Volterra is the site of Stendhal's famously disastrous encounter in 1819 with his beloved Countess Mathilde Dembowska: she recognised him there, despite his disguise of new clothes and green glasses, and was furious. This is the central incident in his book On Love.
  • Volterra is mentioned repeatedly in British author Dudley Pope's Captain Nicholas Ramage historical nautical series. Gianna, the Marchesa of Volterra and the fictional ruler of the area, features in the first twelve books of the sixteen-book series. The books chart the progress and career of Ramage during the Napoleonic wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, providing readers with well-scripted articulate details of life aboard sailing vessels and conditions at sea of that time.
  • Volterra is the site where the novel Chimaira by the Italian author Valerio Massimo Manfredi takes place.
  • Volterra is featured in Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth. It is the location where Hema and Kaushik, the protagonists of the final short story "Going Ashore," take a trip to.

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