Il conte Attilio

Year of grace 1627. While the mercenary captain Attilio Arrigoni is fighting in Flanders at the head of the Spanish Tercios, under the command of General Spinola, in Milan the 18-year-old Lucrezia, the woman he has loved all his life, has been locked up in a convent by her brother and is about to take her vows. In a desperate race against time, Attilio, accompanied by his faithful friend Massimiliano Bonati and riding his Baiardo, embarks on an adventurous journey fraught with danger to try to save her from a destiny she did not choose. But once he arrives in Milan, the city of his heart, as rich as it is corrupt, he discovers that his family, hit by the Spanish financial crisis due to some bad investments, is in danger of ruin. With the help of his cousin Don Rodrigo, squire of Lake Como, Attilio will try to defend his love and rebuild his fortune, concocting a risky and ingenious plan. Amidst anti-Spanish conspiracies, games of pallacorda, ambushes, betrayals and duels to the death, Paglieri, with his elegant and well-calibrated writing, gives us a gripping narrative that combines faithful historical reconstruction with a taste for adventure and the atmospheres typical of swashbuckling novels. But also an unexpected prequel to The Betrothed, narrated from the point of view of the Arrigoni, Manzoni’s mortal enemies. What if Count Attilio was not so bad after all?