Welcome to these pages, dear reader.

The story that follows is a tribute to some characters I've had in my head for some time now; they show up briefly in another one of my stories, Il Ladro, which is currently available only in Italian, but The Open Novella Contest 2019 has offered me the opportunity to finally give them a voice—and they'll speak English this time!  

As far as the language employed is concerned, it is my personal—and probably poor—attempt at creating a way of speaking that could sound a little bit antiquated, fit for a Florentine person of the fifteenth century. I've resorted to using English dialectal terms to slightly mark the speech of illiterate people and commoners. I could have borrowed more from Shakespeare in this regard, but I chose to make dialogues as close to everybody as I could—for the sake of simplicity as much as for my own convenience.    

I've maintained the original names of places and some Italian key words (see cursive), though making them understandable, and you may find notes at the bottom of chapters to further explain their meaning and particular historical aspects.

So, thank you in advance for your patience.

Feel free to comment as much as you want, be it to express doubts and questions or simply your thoughts. 

Have a good read.