Ralph Feliciello

Florentia and the Pazzi Boy Ralph Feliciello

A page-turner, coming-of-age love story, embedded in the Renaissance, and sprinkled with pixie dust.




Orphaned at birth / Exiled / First love challenged / Buried secrets revealed / Roman treasure discovered / New World beckons / Marked for execution






Because falling in love is itself a flight of the fancy, this fanciful novella of first love in the time of the Medici glides from historical fantasy to family tragedy, from comedy to romance, from action-adventure to myth - keeping pace with the soaring spirits of two young lovers struggling together, and sometimes at odds, to make sense of a thrilling and bewildering world of lies, beauty, abuse, and violence.


"Nobody's happy and nobody tells the truth. That's the truth. You happy now?"

The Childwoman






In 1478, during Easter Mass in the cathedral of Florence, assassins cut down Giuliano de' Medici, while in the servants' quarters of Palazzo Pazzi a kitchen maid gives birth to the illegitimate child of the chief conspirator. Lorenzo de' Medici vows that the newborn must die to avenge his father's crime. The infant, secreted out of Florence, grows to young manhood as a gravedigger on a remote island, unaware of his birth in a palazzo or that the Pazzi clan, on their way to claim their long-lost heir, must outrace the Medici-hired killer bent on seeing the boy does not survive his eighteenth year. Meanwhile, the Pazzi boy and beautiful but distant Florentia, of the gemlike eyes, one blue, one green, must liberate themselves from the de facto lord of the island, a defrocked cleric who controls their destinies. From a marvelous fresco, Venus, the goddess of love, promises her aid -- if their love proves true.
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