Tired of the same old vampires? Check out Anne Rice's new race of undead bloodsuckers, independent of the Lestat series. Her alterna-vamp books began with Pandora, but the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, Vittorio, is truly a new beginning--a more controlled story and probably the best of her last half-dozen books.

Rice has called Vittorio her vampire version of Romeo and Juliet. The hunky Vittorio is sweet 16 and "incalculably rich" in 15th-century Italy, the epoch of the Medicis and Vittorio's favorite painter, madly passionate Filippo Lippi. Florence is to Vittorio what New Orleans is to Interview with the Vampire.

One night, Vittorio's family is butchered by vampires. The gorgeous Ursula spares Vittorio to make him her reluctant undying sweetheart. Ursula's ravishings of Vittorio recall the erotica Rice wrote under her own name and the pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.

Vittorio flees to the creepy town of Santa Maddalana, which has made a pact to sacrifice its young to Lord Florian's vampire horde. Vittorio is bent on revenge as he invades the eerie Court of the Ruby Grail (i.e. blood), as angry with the child-sacrificing humans as he is with Florian's fang gangsters. Torn between lust, murderous rage, and vampire thirst, Vittorio is one interestingly troubled soul.

Rice urges readers to enter Vittorio's world by reading the sources she embroiders, Fra Filippo Lippi and Public Life in Renaissance Florence, and to get a feel for the scary communion Vittorio sees in the Court of the Ruby Grail by listening to All Souls' Vespers. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Blood and holy water both run thick through the streets of 15th-century Florence in Rice's 21st novel of the undead, the second in a series of New Tales that leave New Orleans's cemeteries behind. While there's not much plot to this lushly described story of how Vittorio di Riniari became a vampire, there's plenty of period detail about Italy's Golden Age. With the courtly arrogance of one who's to the manor born, Renaissance man Vittorio tells of his seduction into evil immortality. As the 16-year-old scion of a wealthy home, he rubs elbows with Cosimo de Medici and is attracted to the work of Fra Filippo Lippi, whose tormented paintings of angels mirror Vittorio's own heart. In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful "strega," the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge?and his desire for Ursula?propel him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side, especially after Ursula's vampire attentions render him able to see and converse with angels. Though the narrative is presented as a tragic tale of doomed love, we know so little of the swooning, inarticulate Ursula that there's hardly any romance or suspense. And while Vittorio's particular road to hell is a new entry in Rice's repertoire of vampirification, much of the material is familiar: the rich, brash young man transformed against his will who agonizes over his new existence. Vittorio's painstaking narration of his biography takes so long to acquire momentum that when at one point he admits, "This chapter ought to be over," even diehard readers may be tempted to agree that it's time for a new vampire for a new age. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (Mar.) FYI: Rice includes a bibliography of readings for greater appreciation of the time period.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Vittorio, who has grown up in the Florence of the Medicis, pursues the beautiful vampire Ursula after she destroys his entire family. The second in Rice's new vampire series, launched with Pandora.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
"Sensuous . . . Its intensity never flags."
--Los Angeles Times

"MASTERFUL . . . A STORY ILLUMINATED WITH THE METAPHOR OF GOLD, DRENCHED IN HELLISH DARKNESS AND DRIPPING WITH BLOOD."
--USA Today

"[A] LUSHLY DESCRIBED STORY OF HOW VITTORIO DI RINIARI BECAME A VAMPIRE . . . In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful 'strega,' the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge--and his desire for Ursula--propels him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side."
--Publishers Weekly

"ANOTHER ENCHANTING PRETERNATURAL TALE . . . SUPERBLY WRITTEN AND ENGAGING."
--Associated Press

"VITTORIO is set against a magnificent backdrop of history and lore. An opulent feast for the imagination, the lust and passion of the early fourteenth century come to life in Rice's vivid prose."
--Rocky Mountain News

"A READER'S DELIGHT."
--Philadelphia Inquirer


Review
"Sensuous . . . Its intensity never flags."
--Los Angeles Times

"MASTERFUL . . . A STORY ILLUMINATED WITH THE METAPHOR OF GOLD, DRENCHED IN HELLISH DARKNESS AND DRIPPING WITH BLOOD."
--USA Today

"[A] LUSHLY DESCRIBED STORY OF HOW VITTORIO DI RINIARI BECAME A VAMPIRE . . . In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful 'strega,' the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge--and his desire for Ursula--propels him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side."
--Publishers Weekly

"ANOTHER ENCHANTING PRETERNATURAL TALE . . . SUPERBLY WRITTEN AND ENGAGING."
--Associated Press

"VITTORIO is set against a magnificent backdrop of history and lore. An opulent feast for the imagination, the lust and passion of the early fourteenth century come to life in Rice's vivid prose."
--Rocky Mountain News

"A READER'S DELIGHT."
--Philadelphia Inquirer


Book Description

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures--a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the beautiful and sinister vampire Ursula--setting in motion a chilling chain of events that will mark his life for eternity. Against a backdrop of the wonders--both sacred and profane--and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.


From the Inside Flap

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures—a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the beautiful and sinister vampire Ursula—setting in motion a chilling chain of events that will mark his life for eternity. Against a backdrop of the wonders—both sacred and profane—and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.


From the Back Cover

"Sensuous . . . Its intensity never flags."
--Los Angeles Times

"MASTERFUL . . . A STORY ILLUMINATED WITH THE METAPHOR OF GOLD, DRENCHED IN HELLISH DARKNESS AND DRIPPING WITH BLOOD."
--USA Today

"[A] LUSHLY DESCRIBED STORY OF HOW VITTORIO DI RINIARI BECAME A VAMPIRE . . . In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful 'strega,' the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge--and his desire for Ursula--propels him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side."
--Publishers Weekly

"ANOTHER ENCHANTING PRETERNATURAL TALE . . . SUPERBLY WRITTEN AND ENGAGING."
--Associated Press

"VITTORIO is set against a magnificent backdrop of history and lore. An opulent feast for the imagination, the lust and passion of the early fourteenth century come to life in Rice's vivid prose."
--Rocky Mountain News

"A READER'S DELIGHT."
--Philadelphia Inquirer


About the Author
ANNE RICE is the author of twenty-one books. She lives in New Orleans with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
When I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my arms the severed heads of my younger brother and sister. They were quick still, and mute, with big fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was I that I could make no more of a sound than they could.

The dream came true.

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.

I am a vampire.

My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.

By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful, having lived five hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even the angels will attest to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be cautious on that point.

I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven of the Articulate," that band of strange romantic vampires in and from the Southern New World city of New Orleans who have regaled you already with so many chronicles and tales.

I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as fiction. I know nothing of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You will find no new knowledge of them in these pages, not even, hereafter, a mention.

I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of my own beginnings--the fable of my making--and to cast this fragment of my life in book form into the wide world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or destined contact with their well-published volumes.

I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant roaming and study, never provoking the slightest danger from my own kind, and never arousing their knowledge or suspicions.

But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.

It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I believe I have revelations within me which will be wholly original to you. Perhaps when my book is finished and gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow a character in that grand roman-fleuve begun by other vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I cannot know or care about it.

As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones of the place where I was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and misshapen among the thorny blackberry vines and fragrant smothering forests of oak and chestnut trees, I am compelled to record what befell me, for it seems that I may have suffered a fate very unlike that of any other vampire.

I do not always hang about this place.

On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city which for me is the queen of all cities--Florence-- which I loved from the very first moment I saw it with a child's eyes in the years when Cosimo the Elder ran his powerful Medici bank with his own hand, even though he was the richest man in Europe.

In the house of Cosimo de' Medici lived the great sculptor Donatello making sculptures of marble and bronze, as well as painters and poets galore, writers on magic and makers of music. The great Brunelleschi, who had made the very dome of Florence's greatest church, was building yet another Cathedral for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo was rebuilding not only the monastery of San Marco but commencing the palazzo for Cosimo which would one day be known to all the world as the Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo, men went all over Europe seeking in dusty libraries long forgotten the classics of Greek and Rome, which Cosimo's scholars would translate into our native Italian, the language which Dante had boldly chosen many years before for his Divine Comedy.

And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a mortal boy of destiny and promise--yes, I myself saw--the great guests of the Council of Trent who had come from far Byzantium to heal the breach between the Eastern and Western church: Pope Eugenius IV of Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor of the East himself, John VIII Paleologus. These great men I saw enter the city in a terrible storm of bitter rain, but nevertheless with indescribable glory, and these men I saw eat from Cosimo's table.

Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no history of the Medici. But let me only say that anyone who tells you that they were scoundrels, these great men, is a perfect idiot. It was the descendants of Cosimo who took care of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and artists without count. And it was all because a banker, a moneylender if you will, thought it splendid and good to give beauty and magnificence to the city of Florence.

I'll come back to Cosimo at the right point, and only for a few brief words, though I must confess I am having trouble being brief here on any score, but for now let me say that Cosimo belongs to the living.

I have been in bed with the dead since 1450.

Now to tell how it began, but allow me one more preface.

Don't look here, please, for antique language. You will not find a rigid fabricated English meant to conjure castle walls by stilted diction and constricted vocabulary.

I shall tell my tale naturally and effectively, wallowing in words, for I love them. And, being an immortal, I have devoured over four centuries of English, from the plays of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to the abrupt and harshly evocative words of a Sylvester Stallone movie.

You'll find me flexible, daring, and now and then a shock. But what can I do but draw upon the fullest descriptive power I can command, and mark that English now is no more the language of one land, or even two or three or four, but has become the language of all the modern world from the backwoods of Tennessee to the most remote Celtic isles and down under to the teeming cities of Australia and New Zealand.

I am Renaissance-born. Therefore I delve in all, and blend without prejudice, and that some higher good pertains to what I do, I cannot doubt.

As for my native Italian, hear it softly when you say my name, Vittorio, and breathe it like perfume from the other names which are sprinkled throughout this text. It is, beneath all, a language so sweet as to make of the English word "stone" three syllables: pi-ea-tra. There has never been a gentler language on earth. I speak all other tongues with the Italian accent you'll hear in the streets of Florence today.

And that my English-speaking victims find my blandishments so pretty, accented as they are, and yield to my soft lustrous Italian pronunciations, is a constant source of bliss for me.

But I am not happy.

Don't think so.

I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire was happy.

I have a brain as well as a heart, and there hovers about me an etheric visage of myself, created most definitely by some Higher Power, and entangled completely within the intangible weave of that etheric visage is what men call a soul. I have such. No amount of blood can drown away its life and leave me but a thriving revenant.

Okay. No problem. Yes, yes. Thank you!--as everybody in the entire world can say in English. We're ready to begin.

Except I want to give you a quote from an obscure but wonderful writer, Sheridan Le Fanu, a paragraph spoken in extreme angst by a haunted character in one of his many exquisitely written ghost stories. This author, a native of Dublin, died in 1873, but mark how fresh is this language, and how horrifying the expression of the character Captain Barton in the story called "The Familiar":


Whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world--a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us--a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure--I know. . . that there is a God--a dreadful God--and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous--by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific; --there is a spiritual system--great God, how I have been convinced!--a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!


What do you think of that?

I am myself rather mortally struck by it. I don't think I am prepared to speak of our God as "dreadful" or our system as "malignant," but there seems an eerie inescapable ring of truth to these words, written in fiction but obviously with much emotion.

It matters to me because I suffer under a terrible curse, quite unique to me, I think, as a vampire. That is, the others don't share it. But I think we all--human, vampire, all of us who are sentient and can weep--we all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

At the end, we can take this up again. See what you make of my story.

It's early evening here. The brave remnant of my father's highest tower still rises boldly enough against the sweetly star-filled heavens for me to see from the window the moonlighted hills and valleys of Tuscany, aye, even as far as the twinkling sea below the mines of Carrara. I smell the flowering green of the steep undiscovered country round where the irises of Tuscany still break out in violent red or white in sunny beds, to be found by me in the silky night.

And so embraced and protected, I write, ready for the moment when the full yet ever obscure moon leaves me for the hideaway of clouds, to light the candles that stand ready, some six, ensconced within the thick ruggedly worked silver of the candelabra which once stood on my father's desk, in those days when he was the old-style feudal lord of this mountain and all its villages, and the firm ally in peace and war of the great city of Florence and its unofficial ruler, when we were rich, fearless, curious and wondrously contented.

Let me speak now of what has vanished.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures—a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the beautiful and sinister vampire Ursula—setting in motion a chilling chain of events that will mark his life for eternity. Against a backdrop of the wonders—both sacred and profane—and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

SYNOPSIS

Renaissance-born vampire Vittorio, Cosimo de Medici, and the lush city of Florence, Italy, at the height of its glory are all brought to vivid life in Vittorio: The Vampire, the latest in Anne Rice's New Tales of the Vampires series. Rice continues her fascinating and gorgeously written saga of the voluptuaries of the undead, and the beloved vampire in question tastes life in a way we can only imagine -- with Rice at her best!

FROM THE CRITICS

Tish Wells - USA Today

[Rice] does a masterful job of using Christian theology, and the art of the great Renaissance painter Fra Filippo Lippi, to create a story illuminated with the metaphor of gold, drenched in hellish darkness and dripping with blood.

Publishers Weekly

Blood and holy water both run thick through the streets of 15th-century Florence in Rice's 21st novel of the undead, the second in a series of New Tales that leave New Orleans's cemeteries behind. While there's not much plot to this lushly described story of how Vittorio di Riniari became a vampire, there's plenty of period detail about Italy's Golden Age. With the courtly arrogance of one who's to the manor born, Renaissance man Vittorio tells of his seduction into evil immortality. As the 16-year-old scion of a wealthy home, he rubs elbows with Cosimo de Medici and is attracted to the work of Fra Filippo Lippi, whose tormented paintings of angels mirror Vittorio's own heart. In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful "strega," the bare-shouldered Ursula. His desire for revenge — and his desire for Ursula — propel him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side, especially after Ursula's vampire attentions render him able to see and converse with angels. Though the narrative is presented as a tragic tale of doomed love, we know so little of the swooning, inarticulate Ursula that there's hardly any romance or suspense. And while Vittorio's particular road to hell is a new entry in Rice's repertoire of vampirification, much of the material is familiar: the rich, brash young man transformed against his will who agonizes over his new existence. Vittorio's painstaking narration of his biography takes so long to acquire momentum that when at one point he admits, "This chapter ought to be over," even diehard readers may be tempted to agree that it's time for a new vampire for a new age. Agent, Lynn Nesbit.

FYI: Rice includes a bibliography of readings for greater appreciation of the time period.

Library Journal

Vittorio, who has grown up in the Florence of the Medicis, pursues the beautiful vampire Ursula after she destroys his entire family. The second in Rice's new vampire series, launched with Pandora.

Entertainment Weekly

...[A] sense of deju vu pervades...

Andrea Higbie - The New York Times Book Review