Gigi Berardi on Bianca Cappello, the Medici & the Secrets of Renaissance Florence

[00:00:00] Welcome to Plot Twist Radio, the show where creativity, storytelling, and the unpredictable path of the creative life all collide. I'm your host, Erin Egnatz. Gigi, welcome to Plot Twist Radio. It is a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for inviting me to be on the show. I'm looking forward to it, yeah. Awesome. Before we get going, can you introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:00:26] Yeah, so I am a teacher at College of the Environment in Bellingham, Washington, but I also teach some programs in the college in Italy, in Florence in particular, yeah, every summer. So I just got back, and this is the 15th summer that I have done that, which gives me a chance to do research and for my writing.

[00:00:51] And I write a lot of nonfiction, I guess I would call it creative nonfiction, for national publications, and in particular in the performing arts. And yeah, so I just, under that name, Gigi Berardi, there's quite a bit of work I've done in writing features and reviews, yeah.

[00:01:14] Wow, very cool. And it's very interesting to meet someone that does, you know, journalism, nonfiction, and fiction. That is, that's quite interesting. Do you just, just love to write? I do, I do love to write, but I will say that for this book, Bianca's Cure, that I had written 100,000 words in the first vision, in the first version, which I threw away. Like, virtually all of the 100,000 words.

[00:01:44] And so I rewrote the book from the standpoint of Bianca, and before it had been written from the standpoint of her lover and partner, Francesco de' Medici. So a male perspective. So it would have been much quicker if I hadn't have had to do that.

[00:02:04] And in the meantime, I also wrote another book, which was published while I was working on Bianca, and that was creative nonfiction with North Atlantic Books, Food Wise. And so I would say that it was a little interactive. Getting, getting, getting to the, the end of Bianca's Cure. Very cool. And I, I have to comment on the 100,000 that you, you scrapped. I, I've been there.

[00:02:33] It's painful when it happens. Did you find it pretty painful? Let's crap it. It was pretty, it was pretty painful, but it was, it was necessary because the book was, a book became a lot more, was more alive and had much more of a sense of immediacy and urgency when written from a female point of view. So I recognized that. And these were like, you know, book mentors that had, that were reading it.

[00:03:03] And yeah. And I, it, it helped that they were involved with me rewriting it early, early on because I used a lot of what you could call voice or tone exercises to kind of get into Bianca's head. Yeah. So, so there was a bit of experimentation going on, even as I was writing from Bianca's point of view. Cool. So we know that you, you've taught in Florence.

[00:03:30] So that's what inspired the location. But what about the time period? What inspired the time period? Well, the Renaissance. So Florence is all about the Renaissance, so-called birth of the Renaissance. It was in Florence and that was in the 1400s as well as 1500s.

[00:03:52] By the end of the book of Bianca's cure, they, the Renaissance is on the decline some, as the Medici are on the, on the decline themselves as a family. And so I knew that it was Renaissance and for me, and because of the setting of Florence.

[00:04:12] And then in terms of the two branches of the Medici, one in the 1400s and the other in the 1500s, I was very attracted to Francesco. I mean, things really picked up with Cosmo, his father and Francesco in terms of art collecting. And I was interested in that. And then there was a mystery that had been presented to me. It's called the Mystery of the Open Window.

[00:04:41] And that is on the Piazza della Santa Annunziata, Santissima Annunziata. And I was walking with a friend and we were chatting. I was telling her about my ideas for the book. And she said, look behind you, you'll see an open window. I'm like, okay, it doesn't look that open to me. But like, what, what is that?

[00:05:02] And it turns out that in that piazza, there's a big bronze statue of Ferdinando, who is the bad guy in my novel, who didn't think very much of Bianca. And he's pointing to that window. And she told me that the spirit of Bianca Capello lives in that window.

[00:05:19] And so as I was trying different ways to get into the story, one of them was a kind of 2026 or 2015 or 2016, whenever I was writing, version where someone in, you know, our day and age has an experience, kind of experiences Bianca. And that didn't quite work out. But then I just settled on her time period. Yeah. Which is the 1500s, 1540 to 1587.

[00:05:50] Cool. So Bianca, is she inspired by a real historical figure or is she kind of just an emergence of your imagination? Yeah. So she is actually a historic figure. And she was a mistress of Francesco de' Medici. She was married to Piero, who's also in the book, who gets her to Florence.

[00:06:17] She did live in Piero's family's house, very close to the casino, the laboratory of Francesco de' Medici. And they met. And she was his mistress for maybe 15 years. His wife mysteriously dies. And she becomes his wife. So she is a grand duchess of Tuscany, duchess of Florence. And she has Antonio and a little girl before that, Virginia.

[00:06:46] And, yep. So this is, those are facts from history as we know it. She did have her own alchemy or her own study. We'll call it a study in Palazzo Vecchio, which is, again, another setting for the book. It's the Ducal Palace. And it's inhabited by the Medici's when all of a sudden they become royalty in the 1500s. And she has her own study.

[00:07:13] Francesco has one that you can visit also called the Studiolo. And so does Francesco's father, Cosimo, called the Tesoro, the treasure, which is sneakily above Francesco's studio. And you can reach through a secret passageway. And so they were all alchemy of some kind. Very cool. That is, that's interesting. And research can be a rabbit hole. It could really be fun.

[00:07:41] What was the most fascinating thing you discovered that maybe even didn't even make it into the book? Huh. I mean, I think the most fascinating thing I discovered was just that about her study in Palazzo, in Palazzo Vecchio. One, some other things I had discovered maybe about her family, which didn't make it into the book, was that her father, who is also a baddie in the book, but her father, Bartolomeo,

[00:08:07] was obsessed with sickness and disease and actually put a lot of money into what I call sick houses in the book. So we know that he was a patron of those kind of safe places for sick people. So very, very clearly she could have gotten some of her interest in healing people. And malaria comes from there.

[00:08:32] Also, I think the research of Meredith Ray, who wrote a book called Daughters of Alchemy, which was published by Harvard University Press. Yes. So there's no overt references to Meredith Ray's book. This is a work of fiction. But in the book, she talks about how one out of every eight women in Florence were nuns. And this was, you know, obviously a very place safe for people to be,

[00:09:00] women, for women to be who wanted to do their work in medicine and in healing. And something which is in the book, but it's not obvious, is that this name that I made up, Cortese, which is an anagram for, it's the last name of the family that Bianca is from, that is an anagram for segreto, which means secret in Italian.

[00:09:26] And there actually was a house called Cortese that were interested in alchemy, that from Meredith Ray's research. Yeah. So I think that those kind of reference points were really fun for me. I was just following intuition in these exercises where I take on different emotions and given a particular prompt or, you know, scene and came up with what I thought was actually a pretty true

[00:09:54] voice for Bianca in terms of her personality. So that was fun. I bet. I could see where that would be a lot of fun. How do you balance historical accuracy with telling a story that keeps the readers into it and where they can't put it down? Right. I actually followed what we know, which is not very much, but what we know very closely. And I mean, that's a super interesting question.

[00:10:22] Also, I think if I hadn't been as committed to that, I might have had the historical timeline not be chronological. It's actually fairly chronological now. Wow. So, so everything in the book could have happened. And that was important to me. And so how I know that is because of my research, but also I had several colleagues, one in particular

[00:10:49] in Italy who are, who are art history buffs. And I would, could this have taken six hours? Would there have been horses there? That kind of thing. Always checking that. And then I actually, I helped translate the book into Italian and that version was released in May. And, and so the person who did the Italian translation, who is an editor, he and I, I went through this

[00:11:19] very slowly sentence by sentence and do in the translation, we had a lot of conversations as to whether or not something could have happened or not. More often than not, I was informing him that actually, yes, I mean, the fluid of placenta does, does take that placental fluid is sweet, that kind of stuff. So there were, there were, yeah, a number of kind of checks like that.

[00:11:45] We don't know, we don't have a whole lot on Bianca. If we did just rely on those timeline pegs, then it would probably be just a four page book. So, so I, that's, that's why the tonal exercises and Susan Sutliff Brown is a book, a mentor and coach. And this is her bailiwick.

[00:12:12] It, it's so important to tap into what emotional response seems authentic. Since we can't be there, it's 400 years ago, but there seems to be, then this is based on the premise that there's some universal understandable response that seems accurate, that, that feels like it fits

[00:12:35] with the time. So I, I had outside help in terms of the emotional and kind of the tone of it while keeping the core values, but then also the timeline. And it wasn't just the Bianca's timeline. It's also the timeline of the cure in terms of the steps that she took, that she was taking. Did that make sense? Had I, was I going over old material that had appeared earlier without,

[00:13:05] her realizing it or anyway. So there was, there was the herbal cure timeline. There was also Francesco's illness timeline too. So I just needed to all kind of hang together. So like I said earlier, earlier, like you said earlier, you've written in journalism, nonfiction, fiction, which one do you find to be the easiest to write? The easiest, yeah. And also academic stuff. Sometimes it's academic stuff and, and then it's

[00:13:34] like the create creative nonfiction is easier for me, especially, especially reviews. Yeah. And, but features, features also, I think with the fiction, when you're, you know, when you're in the zone, you get, it is easy. It's interesting because that's, that's such great feedback. You know, if it's,

[00:13:57] if it's too difficult, if it's then I just stop and that this, this approach, this dialogue isn't, isn't working. And so I just hop into, you know, try, try and do something else and see if I'll have an easier time of it. The, I should say also that one of the people, the touchstone reference points in Florence, I had, his name is Stefano Corazzini and he had written a book, The Duke in Love,

[00:14:25] with the picture of Bianca and Francesco on the cover. And I saw that I had seen it at the Palazzo Vacchio and I tracked him down and we got, we got together. And, and, and so what we have is a non-fiction kind of creative, non-fiction account. And then we have My Fictional History. And in fact,

[00:14:48] what we did in, what we did in Florence in, in May was we presented at the British Institute, but then also on, on the piazza at the Hotel Oggiata dei Ceruti. We read our books, what, what a similar scene, what the fiction would look like and what the non-fiction looked like. And so that was, that was

[00:15:11] fun. So I, I always had, I always had that to rely on. And, you know, sometimes dates were wrong in the, in the non-fiction and, you know, we, and we would talk about that. But yeah, that was, that was also interesting. So I really felt like kind of obligated, like I had a responsibility to, to keep the,

[00:15:34] the timeline accurate. Cool. So after readers finish the novel, what's one thing that you hope they come away with? Other than that women can be strong and they can be strong scientists. So besides that, I am hoping that people come away from the book with a, with an appreciation for Florence and how Florence now, just like many places, but Florence in particular is what the

[00:16:04] Florentines say is it's become a Disneyland. It's a place of attractions and you wait in line and then you get your, your thrill going to Palazzo Vecchio or climbing the dome, Brunelleschi's dome in the Duomo. And the point I'm hoping people can see is that you can actually experience Florence in a different way. And you can actually experience it much along the lines that these Renaissance figures

[00:16:34] did, if you know where to look and where to go. And pretty much the, the places in the book are actually places you can visit today. So Prattolino, Poggio Acaiano, where Francesco dies, and Palazzo Vecchio, the Ducal, the Ducal Palace, and this Piazza where they call it Santa Elisabetta, but that's actually

[00:16:57] the Hospital of the Innocents, the Hospital dei Innocenti, that is a UNICEF heritage site for adoptees, for orphans, as they were called then. So that hospital where she worked with Sister Angela is a real place and, and it's pretty magnificent. It's only eight euros and it's just tucked away

[00:17:22] on this big piazza away from the Duomo, the main action in Florence. So I'm hoping that people can look for other kinds of experiences where they actually really feel something. And instead of maybe just checking something and ticking something off a list, like climbing the, the cupola, the,

[00:17:45] the, the dome and appreciate what a difficult time people had who were otherwise invisible. And so, yeah, the book is about this strong woman, but it's really about, uh, originally I wrote it, as I said, from the standpoint of Francesco. So it's really about people who are in the wrong place, wrong time almost. And he certainly was, cause he had no interest in, in ruling and he just wanted to be

[00:18:13] left alone in his own study and in the casino, his laboratory. He himself was working on a Medici porcelain, which actually was produced between like 1580 and until he died, 1587. And there's still about 60 pieces in the world, including about a dozen in the Metro, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, museum in New York, but also, uh, in New York city and Los Angeles at the Getty museum. And, um,

[00:18:42] I was just there in March. It was part of the, my book tour and saw one of his flasks there. And, and, you know, coming back to what you were saying before about what I hope people get out of this, I think an appreciation for research too, because if you just keep probing enough, you're going to find really interesting, really interesting connections. And so when I was at

[00:19:06] the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, I am pretty sure that Bianca, so Bianca, his lover, not Bianca, his wife, uh, not Joanna, his wife, her face is on the porcelain. So that's her face, not Joanna's. And that is interesting that he would make such a statement in, uh, in Renaissance, in Renaissance Florence, when he is being attacked right and left for poor government, basically,

[00:19:33] and uneven, uneven government. So I think it's exciting to make those kinds of discoveries. And I know that you also are interested in, you know, paranormal phenomenon, and there's just a number of different ways we can explain what it is that these two people are experiencing in Florence at this

[00:19:56] time. And they did invoke alchemy for manufacturing purposes in particular, and the Medici were fantastically wealthy, especially with the start of and beginning with Cosimo the Elder in the 1400s, who basically invented banking in the Western world. And, um, but they were, they were industrialists

[00:20:18] also, and they, they used alchemy to come up with this approach to inorganic chemistry, which created, you know, there were a lot of products, not only for that, but also for the, for their wool, wool processing, because they were made a lot of money on, off of wool, as did, as did many at the time.

[00:20:40] And Cosimo, his father was fascinated with astrology and believed that he was, he was a god and he was like a Greek god. And with the revival of classicism in the Renaissance, and that was verified by constellations, movement of constellations, which is not necessarily a science that is astrology. So,

[00:21:05] so I, I love that, that part of it. And he, and we have the Medici porcelain. He experimented with different minerals, different minerals in clay. The porcelain comes from clay. Yeah. So it was all exciting. That is. That's, I, and I, I, my day job is like a historian. So, and history professor. So as you're like talking about this, I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm sucking it all up. I love this stuff. I just love

[00:21:32] it. I don't know as much about the Italian. I, cause I, I focus mainly on the U S but man, I do love that stuff so much. And it's just so fascinating to see, you know, how we built upon, you know, civilization after civilization and how we are today. It's just so fascinating to me. Yeah. Well, I, I think, yeah, the, just the idea of that safe houses in the convents, Bianca, if alive would definitely have ended up in one of these places. So there may be,

[00:22:00] there may be more story to Bianca. Yeah. I'd love, I would love it. I think the readers would as well. Where can the listeners find you? So, so yeah, it's Simon & Schuster website. They're the distributors. And of course, Amazon. There is a really beautiful audible version of this, an audio book, and that's available on, on Amazon. But actually if people come to my, if people go to my

[00:22:28] website, ggberardi.com, what I've been working on is just readers questions, what happens to Bianca. And I have quite a few blog posts already. And that's a good place for people to go to see, to get, to download podcasts I've done, but also blog posts. And it would be great if people could take a peek at that. They can also get, I think, two chapters, the first two chapters of the book free.

[00:22:57] Very cool. And I'll make sure all that is linked in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me. This is fascinating. Okay. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thank you.