I recently published a historical short story set in Tursenia, during the glorious Italian Renaissance era! After I translated the Cutting Right to the Chase detective short story series in Italian, I decided to translate in English something I originally wrote in Italian.
The title of this historical short story is The Bloody Wedding, and it’s now available worldwide on Amazon Kindle Store.

The real story behind The Bloody Wedding

The first version of this very short story is dated 2010, when I submitted it to an Italian literary contest. The story won also an award!
Here’s the blurb I wrote for the Amazon Kindle Store product page:

“You cannot give life to a painting if you don’t know who died for it.”

Revenge, betrayals and conspiracy among rivals are nothing compared with the blood spilt over family issues.

Donna Atalanta of Perugia knows this only too well. In 1500 she commissions a young painter named Raffaello Sanzio to create the famous Pala Baglioni–The Entombment.

The behind-the-scenes story of the famous Pala Baglioni, now housed in the Villa Borghese Museum in Rome, is told by a particular voice that accompanies Raffaello during the composition of his work of art.

What happened in the notorious Bloody Wedding of Perugia is the gory genesis of this magnificent painting.

The Bloody Wedding is a historical short story about art and war set in Perugia, Tursenia’s alter ego town, where Chase Williams’s mystery and detective stories take place.
A quick, fascinating dive into the painting and historical narrative, with a pinch of suspense.

The peculiar voice narrating The Bloody Wedding

This short true crime story presents some peculiar elements that readers liked very much so far. For example, I used another point of view as opposed to the omniscient third person. This time the story is told by one of the main characters–the piece of art itself in the making. While Raffaello is depicting the so-called “pala”, the pala tells the readers what’s happening around it, and also tries to explain the reasons why Raffaello’s patron, Atalanta Baglioni, asked the painter to create the piece of art for her.

I couldn’t just write a historical short story without any mystery and suspense in it. This is the true reason why I picked the Bloody Wedding facts among the hundreds of tales the Medieval Tursenia offered me. This way, The Bloody Wedding can fall into my detective and mystery umbrella of stories without looking misplaced or ‘unlinked’ with the rest of the Chase Williams murder mystery series.

A Chase’s cameo in the short story

To strengthen the consistency between The Bloody Wedding and the rest of my writing production, I made sure that Chase appears in there at some point. There’s nothing sci-fi or dystopian happening, don’t worry.

Not only is Chase’s cameo a pleasant surprise (this is what readers said!), but I can also leverage it to explain why I decided to publish The Bloody Wedding as a one-off short story for the time being. In fact I haven’t planned to create a new series about ancient Tursenia.

However, since I received many excited feedback from my mailing list subscribers, I might write more of these stories. Ancient Tursenia has got hundreds of incredible episodes worth telling.

The city where Chase’s mysteries are set is one of the key elements that made the success of the series, therefore it could be really interesting to tell the readers about facts from the past happened in the same places where Chase and Angelo investigate at the present times.

The readers’ reaction to The Bloody Wedding.

Luckily I’ve got all good reviews at the moment, both for the Italian and the English version. You can read some great reviews’ highlights in The Bloody Wedding product page.

The Bloody Wedding is available worldwide on Amazon Kindle store, and is awating you!