The Sorceress of Rome

Rome, October 999: the young emperor Otto III holds court on the Aventine and dreams of restoring the city of the Caesars, while Crescentius, Senator of Rome, prepares his third rising against German rule. Between them move Benilo, the emperor's cynical Grand Chamberlain, who is the slave of the courtesan Theodora, and Stephania, the Senator's beautiful wife, whom Crescentius asks to beguile the enemy he cannot beat in the field. The rising is only the prelude; the enchantment outlasts it. Nathan Gallizier wrote a series of romances of the Italian dark ages; Otto, Crescentius, Stephania and the hermit Nilus are all in the chronicles, and so is the legend that the emperor's love for the Senator's wife was the death of him. Fifty-four plates, from Piranesi's vaulted Prisons to Caravaggio's Fortune Teller, give the dark streets and dungeons of tenth-century Rome their own visual life.