A historical novel which is very different from the tosh historical romances that clog the bookshops and public libraries of England and America. In fact the opposite of a ‘romance’ in its story of a beautiful, intelligent young girl executed by the religious bigots of the Counter-Reformation, after inadvertently getting caught up in the crossfire of rural and ecclesiastical realpolitik. This is a however a deeply enjoyable book that gives an unusual degree of insight into the superstitious rural world from which today’s urban and secular Italy emerged.

Vassalli is a writer committed to connecting our rootless and distracted present to its history and confronting this particular period, the last pre-rationalist epoch in Europe, has a special importance today as thinking people everywhere have to deal with the rise of modern fundamentalisms, which generally possess, like the Holy Inquisition that tortured and burnt the heroine of The Chimera, a great thirst for meting out punishments to those who question their ‘God-given’ authority.

‘The story of the Blessèd Panacea...is that of a luckless young shepherdess, born in 1368 in a village in the Novarese hill-country and dead at a tender age. The first misfortune in her life — a life beset with tragedies! — was very likely the name, Panacea, which her witless parents had imposed on her; but thereafter followed many others, each worse than the last. Orphaned on her mother’s side — say the biographers, and so that day repeated Bishop Bascapè — she was slaughtered at fifteen years old by her stepmother, infuriated with her because she did nothing but pray. She had no sweetheart as did other girls of her age, she did not tend the flock, she did not spin the wool. She did nothing. She just prayed from morn till night and her stepmother beat her to death.’ p164