Download Blood & Beauty: The Borgias; A Novel AudioBook Free
The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels-The Birth of Venus, Together with the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts-has a fantastic talent for breathing life into history. Now Sarah Dunant turns her discerning eye to 1 of the world's most intriguing and infamous families-the Borgias-in an engrossing work of literary fiction. By the finish of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he's defined not only by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. In the event the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with an enormous appetite forever, women, and power must use papacy and family-in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia-in order to succeed. Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest-though increasingly unstable-weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli's The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player. Stripping away the myths throughout the Borgias, Blood & Beauty is a majestic novel that breathes life into this astonishing family and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless.
