A brief history of the cat-flap
The cat flap was invented by Duke Ercole d’Este in the late fifteenth century. Now they’re everywhere.
The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Galileo’s Revenge is based on events that took place in Florence in 1587. It was a world very different to ours. Italy was still divided into a dozen or more independent, competitive principalities – the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Florence and Tuscany, the Two Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples (under Spanish rule), and so forth. The European super-powers – France, Spain and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire – constantly manoeuvred for influence. The Ottoman Empire was ever a threat in the Mediterranean. At the same time Europe was torn apart by religious conflict: broadly-speaking, the Roman Catholic Church against the new Protestant faiths. With the deaths of Michelangelo (1564) and Titian (1576), the High Renaissance in art may have finished, but there were exciting new developments in the sciences.
I shall collect here my posts about life in Galileo’s Italy: about politics and religion, about literature and the arts, and about anything else that appears in my story – from hunting and alchemy, through pornography and poison, to clothing, wine, ice-cream and football.
But first and foremost, click on the image below to learn about the Medici family. They provided the inescapable background to everybody’s life in sixteenth-century Florence and Tuscany.
Ratsbane! or: How to poison an Elizabethan (part 1)
‘Arsenic’ is sometimes called ‘the king of poisons’. But already in the sixteenth-century ‘arsenic’ was available in several different forms, each more or less suited to the job in hand. This article looks at the main alternatives, and the problems…
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The Medici and Florence in the 16th century
My historical novel ‘Galileo’s Revenge’ is set in sixteenth-century Florence, ruled by the Medici Dukes of Tuscany. Originally a family of merchants and bankers, the Medici dominated the government and culture of Florence
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Of Bezoar, and Bezoarticke medicines
In my novel ‘Galileo’s Revenge’, our hero Galileo Galilei has to solve the suspicious death of Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici (1541-87). In the course of his investigation, Galileo turns to the work of French barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-90), especially…
Fynes Moryson, 3: Where to stay and what to eat in Padua
Fynes Moryson (1566-1630) needed to find board and lodging for the winter. The young English gentleman, a near contemporary of Galileo (and Shakespeare), had left England on Mayday, 1591. (See my first Fynes Moryson blog, A rough guide to Shakespeare’s…
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Fynes Moryson arrives in Italy
Fynes Moryson (1566-1630) was a well-connected young gentleman from the East of England. In 1591 he left England to travel around Europe. For the next two and a half years he travelled through the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Prussia, Poland and…
The Poisons of Ambroise Paré
Ambroise Paré (c.1510 – 90) was an innovative barber-surgeon, who became chief surgeon to the kings of France. His collected works, first published in 1582, discuss a wide range of surgical and medical problems, including poisons.
Fynes Moryson’s ‘Itinerary’: a rough guide to Shakespeare’s Europe.
Fynes Moryson (1566-1630) was an Elizabethan gentleman, a couple of years younger than Shakespeare and Galileo. As a young man, in the 1590s, he travelled widely in Europe, and to the Holy Land. This article is the first in a…
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Orlando Furioso, a sixteenth-century Game of Thrones
Orlando Furioso – that is, Mad Orlando, or Orlando goes Mad – is a wonderful 33,000-line epic poem written in Italian by the poet and courtier Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535).
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