In the heart of Medici Florence, part-time model and full-time prostitute Luciana Vetra stumbles across a deadly secret when she is asked to pose for the central figure of Flora in Sandro Botticelli’s famous Primavera. When Luciana is turned away without being paid for her posing for the picture, she steals a smaller scroll of the painting in compensation, only to find that within the picture holds a secret. The secret is so deadly that her friends are being killed all around her as she is forced to run for her life, and finds help in the one man who has never exploited her, Guido Della Torre, a novice at the Monastary of Santa Crose.
I do like a good mystery, and in that way,the Botticelli Secret did not disappoint. I found it to have a very Dan Brown feel to it, much the same as I found in his books The Davinchi Code and also in Angels and Demons. However the main characters Luciana and Guido (a prostitute and a monk) are not Sophie and Robert Langdon. I mean – Luciana has quite a reputation for herself and Guido is a man of the cloth….
however – in that sense the book works, and is mainly why I kept reading.
Where I struggled is that the first 250 or so pages, when Luciana is still quite rough around the edges, the language is foul, some of the acts that the reader is allowed to “witness” is stomach turning, and there is a point where I had to skim in hopes of the books tone changing as Luciana spends more time with Guido.
It does.
The second half of the book shows that Luciana’s heart is softening and I was able to relax more into the details of the read and beauty of the details as they travel around trying to solve the clues that are given within this amazing (and real) painting. I enjoyed the clues and the solving of them and liked the second half of the read a lot more than the first half.
Overall, if you can hang in there, the book is filled with colorful details of the cities they travel fifteenth century Renaissance Italy.
Bookies (Book Club review)
The Bookies found the book centered around the painting to be quite interesting. Of the 13 of us at the review, only one of us had ever heard of the painting before. In that sense, the book gave us a little bit of culture that we were not quite expecting, but enjoyed.
Most of us found the beginning of the book and Luciana’s character to be quite crude and the language and acts in that part were probably the worst we have encountered as a group in all the years we have been meeting (since Aug. 2001). However, only 4 of the Bookies at the review truly disliked the book. The rest found that if you could get through the first part, and realize that the author is creating a very vivid picture of who Luciana was, it makes the ending all the more sweeter.
On an overall scale of 1 – 5, five being the best, The Botticelli Secret rated a 4 average with the Bookies.
Amazon Rating
Book Journey has updated the 2010 Reading map to include The Boticelli Secret
When in Florence, there are a variety of excellent coffee shops to fit your tastes.
Cover story: I think that it fits the story well.
I purchased my copy of this book from Amazon.com
Book Journey 