Presentation

Welcome!
In this blog I am introducing the historic novels that kept me busy with most of my writer activity since 2009. I am not a writer, so the novels are not the fruit of a pre-confectioned idea, but of a feeling towards the town of Naples I feel so tied with. Here I just want to share the experience collected to get to the books in their final version.
You can see this blog as The making of…
Here I am collecting the historical sources I accessed, their critics, there will be short excerpts of the text here and there… I believe it will be a merry and intriguing experience, and I count on the readers' contribution to progress on this adventure.
Yep, you know: appetite comes by eating (as we say in Italy), I loved so much to close these stories, and I found so many more hints for future ones, that I already feel ready to begin another one!
But, first things first, let's do the things as they should be done, and let me stay with my feet on the ground: at this time all I have is enough to write about these two novels: Neapolis - The Siren's Recall and Neapolis - The Horsemasters, and I can assure it is hot stuff. Are you curious? Well, you just need to start reading these pages: it is all history, real history, just a bit forgotten.

Philogelos

He who knows one's own limitations also knows that those limitations do exist. If he is gifted with goodwill, he can try and exceed them.
I don't think I am extremely “brilliant”: I am more an introverted and more prone to deep meditation than to laughter. My grandpa, who was a writer in Neapolitan language as a hobby, was gifted with a precious comedian style, infinitely stronger than mine! Yet, while writing Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, I felt the desperate need of that very comedian style.
Why?, one might ask. Can one find hilarious moments in a story as violent as the one a siege?
As a matter of facts, the Neapolitan spirit could find any moment good for laughter.
And I had a problem: I wanted to imbue that spirit in the story I wanted to tell, but I missed that very spirit. What to do?

Foreword

This blog is the English version of the one I have been editing since 2012 in Italian and that was intended as a logbook describing the work-in-progress of my historic novels about brilliant, little-known moments of the ancient Naples' history.
With time I grew conscious of the quality of the work done, and thought about expanding the readers' base to the English-speaking world, in search for the opportunities that this step would bring: English language publishers, movie writers, tourist trip organizers, you name it.
The blog covers different parts of my creative process, starting from the analysis of the Greek and Latin historical and literary sources all the way to the introduction of excerpts from my novels. The reason for such a wide approach to the novels is that my novels are really the fruit of all this massive work: the Greek and Latin sources often give conflicting versions of the events they report, and seldom they conflict with the reality of the times or places reported.
My novels are thus the result of the attempt to be inspired by those chronicles, give them a coherence, produce a novel that satisfied my taste. This whole work was a growing up and gratifying experience.
Of course, this whole effort was much stronger than what strictly needed to write the novels, not all that I found and read could find its way into them, nor it could be explained there: the novels are a plece where to tell one tale, not the history of Greek/Roman Neapolis. This blog is also the chance to recollect all that material for the curious reader, for he who wants to know more about it.
For such a reader, the main page is thus the one listing the bibliographic sources.
Next to this, to titillate your curiosity and wishing that you will appreciate it, there is a page of excerpts from the novels.
Another page describes the temporal evolution of this project.
I wish that you will like this setting and wish to know your opinion about it. Write in plenty!