You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio Scarpia, portrayed on stage as a ‘sadistic agent of reaction’, a cut-throat murderer who enjoys drinking his victims’ blood from their skulls and, as one of my opera-loving Kensington pals puts it, ‘not a nice bloke at all!’
In fact you may not even recognise him in these pages. Here Scarpia appears as an all-round human being, kind-hearted, handsome, likeable, occasionally lonely, even destitute, who also just happens to be a brilliant swordsman and man of action. Brought up in Sicily, his first act of daring is to rescue a girl who has been captured by Barbary pirates, even if it means stabbing her lover in the stomach. Later, he forgives one of his enemies by pretending to have him shot and thrown to the dogs but actually letting him secretly escape.
Set at the end of the 18th century and lit up by philosophical pronouncements like ‘Not to forgive is itself a sin’, this tender, savage book offers a powerful portrait of ancient Italy, its palazzos and parties, powdered wigs and episcopal rings, candlewax, incense, ice cream and loads of sex.
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