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Vittorio, the Vampire (New Tales of the Vampires) Mass Market Paperback – February 27, 2001
| Anne Rice (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateFebruary 27, 2001
- Dimensions4.21 x 0.76 x 6.8 inches
- ISBN-100345422392
- ISBN-13978-0345422392
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Editorial Reviews
Review
--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
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
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.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (February 27, 2001)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345422392
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345422392
- Item Weight : 5.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.21 x 0.76 x 6.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #368,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #346 in Vampire Horror
- #588 in Vampire Thrillers
- #3,181 in Historical Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, as well as a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science. Anne has spent more of her life in California than in New Orleans, but New Orleans is her true home and provides the back drop for many of her famous novels. The French Quarter provided the setting for her first novel, Interview with the Vampire. And her ante-bellum house in the Garden District was the fictional home of her imaginary Mayfair Witches.
She is the author of over 30 books, most recently the Toby O'Dare novels Of Love and Evil, and Angel Time; the memoir, Called Out of Darkness;and her two novels about Jesus, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. (Anne regards Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana as her best novel.) ---- Under the pen name, A.N. Roquelaure, Anne is the author of the erotic (BDSM) fantasy series, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. Under the pen name Anne Rampling she is the author of two erotic novels, Exit to Eden and Belinda.
Anne publicly broke with organized religion in July of 2010 on moral grounds, affirming her faith in God, but refusing any longer to be called "Christian." The story attracted surprising media attention, with Rice's remarks being quoted in stories all over the world. Anne hopes that her two novels about Jesus will be accepted on their merits by readers and transcend her personal difficulties with religion. "Both my Christ the Lord novels were written with deep conviction and a desire to write the best novels possible about Jesus that were rooted in the bible and in the Christian tradition. I think they are among the best books I've ever been able to write, and I do dream of a day when they are evaluated without any connection to me personally. I continue to get a lot of very favorable feedback on them from believers and non believers. I remain very proud of them."
Anne is very active on her FaceBook Fan Page and has well over a million followers. She answers questions every day on the page, and also posts on a variety of topics, including literature, film, music, politics, religion, and her own writings. Many indie authors follow the page, and Anne welcomes posts that include advice for indie authors. She welcomes discussion there on numerous topics. She frequently asks her readers questions about their response to her work and joins in the discussions prompted by these questions.
Her novel, "The Wolves of Midwinter," a sequel to "The Wolf Gift" and part of a werewolf series set in Northern California in the present time, will be published on October 15, 2013. In these books --- The Wolf Gift Chronicles -- Anne returns to the classic monsters and themes of supernatural literature, similar to those she explored in her Vampire Chronicles, and tales of the Mayfair Witches. Her new "man wolf" hero, Reuben Golding, is a talented young man in his twenties who suddenly discovers himself in possession of werewolf powers that catapult him into the life of a comic book style super hero. How Reuben learns to control what he is, how he discovers others who possess the same mysterious "wolf gift," and how he learns to live with what he has become --- is the main focus of the series. "The Wolves of Midwinter" is a big Christmas book --- a book about Christmas traditions, customs, and the old haunting rituals of Midwinter practiced in Europe and in America. It's about how the werewolves celebrate these rituals, as humans and as werewolves. But the book also carries forward the story of Reuben's interactions with his girl friend, Laura, and with his human family, with particular focus on Reuben's father, Phil, and his brother, Jim. As a big family novel with elements of the supernatural, "The Wolves of Midwinter" has much in common with Anne's earlier book, "The Witching Hour." Among the treats of "The Wolves of Midwinter" is a tragic ghost who appears in the great house at Nideck Point, and other "ageless ones" who add their mystery and history to the unfolding revelations that at times overwhelm Reuben.
In October of 2014, with the publication of "Prince Lestat," Anne returned to the fabled "Brat Prince" of the Vampire Chronicles, catching up with him in present time. This is the first of several books planned focusing on Lestat's new adventures with other members of the Vampire tribe. When the publication of "Prince Lestat" was announced on Christopher Rice's "The Dinner Party Show," a weekly internet radio broadcast, it made headlines in the US and around the world. "Prince Lestat" debuted at #3 on the New York Times Best Seller list and ran for nine weeks during the height of the competitive Fall-Winter season, with another week on the extended NYTBSL. ----
"Beauty's Kingdom," is the fourth in her "Sleeping Beauty Erotica Series," and the first to be launched in hardcover. Though the first three novels were published in the 1980's under the pseudonym, A.N. Roquelaure, the name, Anne Rice, was added to the series in the 1990's. About her erotica, Anne has this to say: "I believe in the erotic imagination. I believe men and women have a right to write and read erotic fantasies. My goal with the "Sleeping Beauty" books is to provide the most authentic erotica that I can for those who share BDSM fantasies."
"Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis" was published on November 29th, 2016 revealing a new adventure in the life of the Brat Prince of the vampires, and the entire tribe --- as they confront the most difficult challenge they've ever faced. This novel may introduce Lestat and extend his appeal to science fiction readers and fantasy readers who love differing versions of the lost kingdom of Atlantis. The novel does justice to both themes: Atlantis and Lestat. So far, as of early 2016, this novel has received a remarkably positive response with Amazon reviewers.
Anne's first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 and has gone on to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. She continued her saga of the Vampire Lestat in a series of books, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles, which have had both great mainstream and cult followings.
Interview with the Vampire was made into a motion picture in 1994, directed by Neil Jordan, and starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst and Antonio Banderas. The film became an international success. Anne's novel, Feast of All Saints about the free people of color of ante-bellum New Orleans became a Showtime mini series in 2001 and is available now on dvd. The script for the mini series by John Wilder was a faithful adaptation of the novel.
Near the end of 2016, the theatrical rights to the Vampire Chronicles reverted fully and completely to Anne. She and her son, Christopher Rice, are now developing outlines and scripts for a new television series based on the adventures of The Vampire Lestat. Anne's announcement of this on FB reached well over 2 million people. "The reception in the Hollywood community" has been very simply wonderful," says Anne. "We have high hopes that we will see the Lestat television series go into production before the end of 2017."
Anne Rice is also the author of other novels, including The Witching Hour, Servant of the Bones, Merrick, Blackwood Farm, Blood Canticle, Violin, and Cry to Heaven. She lives in Palm Desert, California, but misses her home in New Orleans. She hopes to obtain a pied a terre in the French Quarter there some time in the near future.
Anne has this to say of her work: "I have always written about outsiders, about outcasts, about those whom others tend to shun or persecute. And it does seem that I write a lot about their interaction with others like them and their struggle to find some community of their own. The supernatural novel is my favorite way of talking about my reality. I see vampires and witches and ghosts as metaphors for the outsider in each of us, the predator in each of us...the lonely one who must grapple day in and day out with cosmic uncertainty."
------
Anne's announcement of the Vampire Chronicles series as it appeared on FB.
"The theatrical rights to the Vampire Chronicles are once again in my hands, free and clear! I could not be more excited about this! --- A television series of the highest quality is now my dream for Lestat, Louis, Armand, Marius and the entire tribe. In this the new Golden Age of television, such a series is THE way to let the entire story of the vampires unfold. --- My son Christopher Rice and I will be developing a pilot script and a detailed outline for an open ended series, faithfully presenting Lestat’s story as it is told in the books, complete with the many situations that readers expect to see. We will likely begin with “The Vampire Lestat” and move on from there. ----- When we sit down finally to talk to producers, we will have a fully realized vision of this project with Christopher as the executive producer at the helm. I will also be an executive producer all the way. ---- Again, I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to be able to announce this. ---- As many of you know, Universal Studios and Imagine Entertainment had optioned the series to develop motion pictures from it, and though we had the pleasure of working with many fine people in connection with this plan, it did not work out. It is, more than ever, abundantly clear that television is where the vampires belong. ---- Over the years you all have told me how much you want to see a “Game of Thrones” style faithful rendering of this material, and how much you want for the series to remain in my control. Well, I have heard you. I have always heard you. What you want is what I want. --- You, the readers, made these books a success before any movie was ever made based on them, and I will never forget that fact. ---- Christopher and I will be posting many questions on the page for your input in the days to come. ----- I am filled with optimism this morning about the future for my beloved Brat Prince. What better way to start a tour for the new book!"
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Vittorio, however, seems to have less of this than most of the other books. He promises at the beginning of his story that his is different from the other stories we have heard, and seems to have made good on this promise.
Vittorio di Raniari is a Renaissance Vampire. He comes from the mountains above Florence in the days of the Medici.
His father’s castle, unharmed over the previous three hundred years or so, is invaded one night by an army of what Vittorio refers to as demons. They turn out to actually be Vampires. He is particularly impressed by a young girl Vampire named Ursula who orders the others to leave him alone. But they have killed the rest of his family, and Vittorio can think of nothing but revenge.
After putting the dead members of his family in the crypt, he leaves his castle, attempting to make his way to Florence to get help. Eventually, the Vampires catch him and take him to their castle, where he witnesses their bizarre rituals and sees the menagerie of people they keep to feed on. They ask him to join them, but he refuses. His punishment is to be that all people will be unable to understand him and regard him as insane.
Somehow, he escapes and makes it to Florence, where he encounters two Angels straight out of his favorite paintings by Fra Filippo Lippi. He can see them when no one else can and understand them. They claim to be Fra Filippo's guardian angels and guide the people around him to take him to a monastery where he is cared for. By the time he has recovered, people can understand him again.
Vittorio convinces the two angels, their superior, Mastema, and his own guardian angels to accompany him back to the castle of the Vampires where he plans to kill all of them while they are asleep during the day and free the people they are holding prisoner. He manages to kill all but Ursula. He falls under her spell, and the angels leave him.
You need to read this one with an open mind. You need to allow yourself, as the reader, to welcome and become fully immersed in someone else's story. If you can do that, you'll enjoy it. If not, you'll probably be disappointed. Anne does a lovely job of bringing Florence to life, and I assure you, Vittorio can out talk, Lestat. I know! That's quite the feat...
It's a quick read, but doesn't really take off until chapter 3; so if you can hold on tight and give Vittorio an opportunity to enlighten you, I think you'll be impressed.
This book raises the philosophical question of whether or not it is acceptable to sacrifice the infirm and helpless of a society for the others to be wealthy and prosperous. Both in Vittorio's family lands, and in the town of Santa Maddalana, the people had sacrificed their children and their week in order to prosper. They had no crime, no infirm, no sick, no plague, none of the suffering that usually plagues human society. But is prosperity and peace worth the horrible price? The question has troubled philosophers and politicians for a long time.
[Note: The Ruby Grail cult apparently numbered about 46 vampires. In Rice's vampire novels, every vampire needs about 1 victim's blood per day. That comes to about 16790 victims per year, or significant city in the 16th century. It comes to about 840,000 deaths in a 50 year human lifetime, more than even the largest cities. That seems to me to be a non-sustainable depletion of human population.]










