Historical novels focused on such suggestive periods as the seventeenth century, with Western civilization subject to dangerous ups and downs, have always had a special aftertaste for me. If we also focus the plot on Rome, the eternal city and the beginning of all Western culture, it can be predicted that I will end up enjoying the approach and setting without a doubt.
Fictions of this type, and by historians or archaeologists such as Marcello simoniKnowing that ancient reality and its most minute details, it is a pleasant trip to those uses and customs of men and women in which we still reflect ourselves in our languages, our morals and in a multitude of other aspects.
In the book The Mark of the Inquisitor, everything begins as a suspense novel, a kind of detective genre dating back to that seventeenth century that illuminated relevant scientific discoveries.
But of course, between science and religion the dispute was already served. What once explained the beliefs now became a fertile field for those scientific assumptions that seemed to threaten the Creator himself.
The use of the printing press could take care of spreading that diabolical wisdom. Much of the Church understood this option as an attack, not only because of the heresy but also because of the loss of power over the consciences of some people who could understand that things could have a rational explanation ...
The point is that we started reading with a dead man. His body remains trapped between the plates of a printing press. Our Sherlock Holmes on duty, or rather Fray Guillermo de Baskerville, in this case becomes Girolamo Svampa, in charge of finding out what happened.
Of course, not a few will wish the truth never to be known. Whatever the price… The obscurantism continues to be a spiritual refuge for blind believers, for self-sacrificing habits and, above all, for pastoral miters and rings.
You can now buy the novel Inquisitor's Mark, the new book by Marcello Simoni, here: