Il rogo della Repubblica

Venice 1480. Three Jews burnt at the stake, justice giving way to intolerance. A tragedy destined to be repeated in all times and places. A new, compelling novel, part history and part fiction, by the author of Non tutti i bastardi sono di Vienna, Premio Campiello 2011.
In 1480, in a small town near Treviso, a child disappears without a trace. The arch-sorcerer Servadio and two other Jews are accused of having killed him to use his blood to make the Easter cakes. Tortured and sentenced to death for ritual infanticide, they appeal and the trial is reopened before the Senate of Venice. Boris da Candia, spy of the Republic of San Marco, a man of ‘deception and robbery’, violent Levantine adventurer, but also cultured humanist, is entrusted with a secret mission. Venice has just emerged from a war against the Turks and the plague. Discontent spreads. The Franciscan Bernardino da Feltre, with his fiery sermons, stirs up hatred against the Jews among the people, because his religious order wants to replace their pawnshops with those of the Monte di Pietà. The Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, for economic and public order reasons, issues a bull that proclaims tolerance and imposes respect for the Jews, hard-working citizens loyal to the law, but this is not enough to moderate the plebeian hatred instigated by the ferocious preacher. Boris da Candia, a witty and at times brutal Corto Maltese, who frequents palaces and brothels, comes across a sorceress during his investigations, a woman of mysterious charms, who reveals details unknown to everyone: ‘Detail is the crossroads where the visible and the invisible meet’. Giovanni, a street urchin, helps him to extricate himself. But it is the dialogue with Servadio that leaves the greatest impression on him, because the wise and gentle arch-yogi reveals himself to be a man of such overwhelming spirituality that he makes the unbelieving adventurer falter, and this generates in Boris an unexpected thirst for justice: ‘People, not knowing how to make the just strong, call the strong just’. But what space do the reasons of the spirit have in the blind inertia of History? Andrea Molesini’s musical composition masterfully sculpts the bitter emotional intensity of the story. Boris is a character who discovers that, in spite of his past, he is the door that connects two worlds, comedy and tragedy, that intertwine and merge in the eternal spectacle of action, where public evil has always reached everyone’s home.