Vittorio the Vampire (New Tales of the Vampires) (Signed Bookplate Edition)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures — a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue.

Against a backdrop of the wonders — both sacred and profane — and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

SYNOPSIS

Renaissance-born vampire Vittorio, Cosimo de Medici, and the lush city of Florence, Italy, at the height of its glory are all brought to vivid life in Vittorio: The Vampire, the latest in Anne Rice's New Tales of the Vampires series. Rice continues her fascinating and gorgeously written saga of the voluptuaries of the undead, and the beloved vampire in question tastes life in a way we can only imagine — with Rice at her best!

FROM THE CRITICS

Entertainment Weekly

...[A] sense of deju vu pervades...

Andrea Higbie - The New York Times Book Review

Another of Anne Rice's loquacious vampires, Vittorio does prattle on.

Publishers Weekly

Blood and holy water both run thick through the streets of 15th-century Florence in Rice's 21st novel of the undead, the second in a series of New Tales that leave New Orleans's cemeteries behind. While there's not much plot to this lushly described story of how Vittorio di Riniari became a vampire, there's plenty of period detail about Italy's Golden Age. With the courtly arrogance of one who's to the manor born, Renaissance man Vittorio tells of his seduction into evil immortality. As the 16-year-old scion of a wealthy home, he rubs elbows with Cosimo de Medici and is attracted to the work of Fra Filippo Lippi, whose tormented paintings of angels mirror Vittorio's own heart. In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful "strega," the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge — and his desire for Ursula — propel him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side, especially after Ursula's vampire attentions render him able to see and converse with angels. Though the narrative is presented as a tragic tale of doomed love, we know so little of the swooning, inarticulate Ursula that there's hardly any romance or suspense. And while Vittorio's particular road to hell is a new entry in Rice's repertoire of vampirification, much of the material is familiar: the rich, brash young man transformed against his will who agonizes over his new existence. Vittorio's painstaking narration of his biography takes so long to acquire momentum that when at one point he admits, "This chapter ought to be over," even diehard readers may be tempted to agree that it's time for a new vampire for a new age.

FYI: Rice includes a bibliography of readings for greater appreciation of the time period.

Library Journal - Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Bowie, MD

In Rice's latest, Vittorio tells of his human life and the dramatic events that led him to join the ranks of the undead. He is 16, living the privileged life of the nobility in Renaissance Italy, when a host of vampires savagely attacks his family. His parents, brother, and sister are ruthlessly murdered, but Vittorio has caught the eye of the beautiful vampiress Ursula and is spared. Eventually, Vittorio has his revenge on the demons who have destroyed his loved ones, but he pays a terrible price — part of which is that he must become a vampire himself. In addition to Rice's trademark sensuality, a strong current of Christian philosophy drives the plot. This is the second book after Pandora (LJ 3/1/98) in Rice's "New Tales of the Vampires" series, and it is told in the rhythmic, evocative prose of her best works.

Kirkus Reviews

The second entry in a new series of short vampire fabulisms began with Rice's well-received Pandora (1998), set in ancient Rome. Now Rice's charm-weaving about bloodsuckers moves up to Italy's Age of Gold. As ever with her historicals, including Servant of the Bones (1996), Rice seems at her most thoughtful when blending research into neatly melodic paragraphs. Here, the action debuts five hundred years ago in the Florence of the Medicis. Young Vittorio, son of an incalculably wealthy father, lives in a mountaintop castle built on formerly Etruscan land (its graves predate Christ) and is trained for the knighthood at age 13. When demons invade the castle and kill all the adults (and steal all the children), Vittorio fights the demon Ursula and cuts off her arm, which she sticks right back on, while another demon beheads Vittorio's younger brother and sister before his eyes. With no one left alive in the castle, Vittorio vows vengeance on the demons, arranges his family's bodies in a crypt, then takes all the money and jewelry he can rustle up and sets out for Florence. But as night falls, Ursula reappears and ravishes the16-year-old in his bed, insisting that she's saved his life. Soon he finds himself adrift in a town that's under a strange spell-it's a sort of Pleasantville without any known illnesses, any need for nuns, or any hospitals. Another donnybrook with demons, though, lands Vittorio in the court of the Ruby Grail, whose kitchen serves as a holding cell for all the sick people who've been missing from the village below. Vengeance redux, though his feelings for Ursula take an odd upsurge. The story then mires down joyously in the blissful vigors of demonic blood,with blood flowing everywhichway, and in the horrid hungers it brings.