History offers a rich, fascinating treasure trove of people, events, and customs. Today, I'm delighted to host Italian writer Luca Azzolini as he shares with us his journey from a kid who was curious about everything to the author of a new trilogy, "Romulus."
The luck of living in a country like Italy is that you can touch history every time, everywhere. We cannot avoid seeing it, experiencing it, touching it or breathing it. Everything around us tells us about a mythical and distant past. And in some places you can live this even stronger than in others.
Mantua is the city where I live, and it is a stratification of different eras that coexist with each other. There are the remains of the Etruscan age, the Roman ruins, the medieval castle, the Renaissance palaces and squares.
I think my love for history began here. I read as much as I could. Especially essays. I realize I've always been a weird kid! Which 12-year-old would passionately study the contents of Canopic jars? Which twelve-year-old would be passionate about the genealogies of the great noble dynasties of Italy? From the Gonzaga, to the Este and to the Sforza.
Well, I was that kind of kid!
The love for novels came immediately after. There was a key moment that I remember very well. At the age of fourteen I faced a crucial choice. Of those that can change your life forever. I wanted two books and could only buy one. I was very torn.
The first was an essay by a well-known Italian astrophysicist, Margherita Hack, whose title I no longer remember.
The second was a novel, in a brightly colored cover, by an author unknown to me at the time: The Planet Savers, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
I chose the astrophysics essay. I stayed for more than an hour in the bookshop with that book in hand.
Then I went back to the shelves, put down the essay, and took The Planet Savers away with me.
I owe a lot to that novel. Reading that book, and the whole Darkover saga, was perhaps the most beautiful, adventurous and exciting journey of my life. Not only I discovered a distant planet where I felt at home, but I also realized I wanted to write novels. Since then I have set my whole life on that choice. At the age of nineteen I chose a faculty at the University of Verona that would allow me to discover “as many stories as possible, and as many lives as possible.” My choice fell on Art History. I never imagined that, over a decade later, that choice would pay back.
Following that path, I started writing books for children and YA: first for small publishers, then for big Italian publishers. But after more than a decade as an author of children's books — a genre of fiction that I really love, because it has a strong educational and training component — I felt the pressing need to explore a territory that I never really dealt with. The opportunity arose when my literary agent informed me about a particular editorial project. A TV series was being developed in Italy set in a historical era little known to most, and they were looking for an author to write a story about the origins of ancient Rome.
When one thinks of ancient Rome, of Romulus and Remus, however, it is easy to fall into the temptation to stop at the surface of the myth. It is a well-known legend: two twins, raised by a she-wolf, who were the progenitors of a great empire. I started to read up. A truly exciting undertaking for me, that I came from studies that I was finally able to put to good use. But where was the historical truth or the archaeological evidence in all this? I was interested in reconstructing, if possible, a sort of historical truthfulness. Approaching to that story with a question: “How could it really have gone?”
Destiny, however - the Fate of the Latins - enjoys putting mortal beings to the test... I would have had to face an impressive historical research to document myself, move from one library to another, and from one archive to another. In all of this I had not considered the arrival of a global pandemic. The Covid-19 virus hit Italy hard and my region, Lombardy, even more hard. For three months we went through a total lockdown, without going out from home, and it was a dramatic moment for everyone. Despite the difficulty, I was lucky enough to recover all the university texts on which I had previously studied: the volumes of Roman history, the volume of Etruscology, the volumes of Greek and Roman archeology, the essay on the history of the Ancient Near East. In my life I have always found in books a way to deal with things, a way forward, and it has been like this again.
I had my sources, I could write. I literally immersed myself in a history three thousand years away (we are around 753 BCE). And I immediately asked myself how to convey to today's reader events, languages (Osco, Proto-Latin), events that could seem so distant and alien.
Well, going into my research and studying the Latin authors who told that mythical past, I realized that yesterday's history has strong interconnections with our today. There are social motivations that reach us and still trace our time. There are cultural, religious and political — even linguistic — aspects that persist and were structured at that time. The Mediterranean basin was a seething cauldron of civilization. Everyone sought, as they could, their own modus vivendi amidst social crises, infighting and choices dictated by truly modern logics.
The eighth century BCE is a decisive era. It saw the union of thirty cities in the Alban League under the dominion of the powerful Alba Longa (the White City). From here, the step to Rome was simple, short, and almost automatic. The key to a strong and cohesive society was to be more inclusive. It sounds simple, but today we realize what it must have been this almost three thousand years ago. It was accepting the differences as an additional value. It was welcoming the other and integrating them without losing the value that this integration brings. The coasts of Latium vetus, and more generally Italy, overflowed civilizations with different uses and customs, the aforementioned Alban peoples, the Etruscans, the people of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, but also the peoples of the Sabines, Ernici, Marsi. Each of these civilizations contributed to the myth of Rome, and I believe this is a great and powerful truth.
To set up a trilogy, starting from these bases, was easy. It allowed me to create a series of parallels between yesterday and today. For example, an important step was studying the rites of the priestesses of the Goddess Vesta. The vestals — six in that distant era — had the sonly purpose of worshiping the warm womb of the Great Mother, Vesta. And to prepare the ingredients for any public or private sacrifice, such as mola sauce, a toasted flour mixed with salt, with which the victim was sprinkled (hence the term “immolate”). In short, every cult began with them.
And this was a closed, segregated, virginal order, it was not free from the thrusts that we still find today. They were women forced to live for thirty years within the walls of time, and not a single day less. Yet, despite this, already at that time there were vestals ready to do anything to affirm their identity. Brave. Fierce. These women were the inspiration for a character in my trilogy, the rebel vestal Ilia.
Tarpeia, her contemporary, of which the chronicles speak, daughter of the commander of the Roman citadel, Spurius Tarpeius, intolerant of her role (so the Latin poets tell us), was corrupted with gold by the Sabine king, Tito Tazio, and allowed the enemies to cross the gates of Alba Longa.
Another, many centuries later, succeeded where the others failed. And he ascended the imperial throne. Emperor Heliogabalus, who identified himself with the sun god, married the vestal Aquilia Severa in second marriage in 220 AD, in a marriage that simulated that of the two gods.
It was easy to find my Ilia's voice in these women. She is a woman forced by men to live a life that is not hers, and to have to find her own voice (the authentic one) to face her world. The same can be said of the male protagonists, not always the “Classic” example of the Roman devoted to weapons and battle, as it has been handed down to us by the Classical Epic. No. I wanted men who were an expression of our time. Men capable of thinking and feeling complex feelings, of experiencing real torment for what Fate calls them to do. Fighting for a different future. Fighting for a new empire and to give another course to history.
The trilogy plays a lot on the parallels that I encountered during my research, and I liked that this story, distant yet so close, in some ways also speaks of our days. History is the only means we have to avoid repeating past mistakes and dramas.
History is alive and speaks to us. Are we able to listen to it?
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