As a child I loved creating stories, but somehow adult life proved to be more complicated, full of responsibilities, and I never seemed to be able to find the time to put the stories in my head down on paper. That is until 2020…
Covid started spreading around the world and in March it reached Ireland. We all went into lockdown, and I suddenly found myself with an enormous amount of free time and not much to fill it with.
So, after baking more loaves of bread than my husband and I could actually eat and binging every available series on Netflix, I decided that perhaps now was the best time to fulfil one of my dreams… that of becoming a writer.
Actually, I haven’t been completely honest with you, I did write another novel apart from ‘Beatrice’s fate’. It was at university when the Twilight saga was all the rage and I, just like many other people, wrote a vampire novel. How original of me!
Thankfully, only my mother and a handful of my closest friends got to read it and it was actually one of these friends, Martina, who, in March 2020, asked me if I had ever done anything with that novel. Fortunately, I had never been brave enough to actually take it to the next level, but her words got me thinking.
I still had that dream, the dream of someday becoming a writer; life hadn’t managed to make me fully forget about it. So, I thought, there is no perfect moment like the present, when I am stuck in my house with not much to do…
The question was… what should I write about? I honestly didn’t know. Inspiration seemed to elude me when I needed it the most… Then, one day, I read an article, one that explained how the same two towns near Bergamo that had been experiencing the highest number of Covid deaths were the same one that had experienced the highest number of deaths during the plague of 1630.
Now, I feel like I need to explain a couple of things. I’m originally from a town near Bergamo, Northern Italy, which was the epicentre of the Covid crisis in Italy.
Every day I spoke to family and friends who told me about the difficult situation, the constant sound of ambulance sirens, the dead buried without the presence of family members, the worry… I was lucky not to experience it firsthand, but, even though I was thousands of miles away, I felt close to them, I couldn’t help thinking about what they were going through.
Also, if you are not from Italy, you are probably asking yourself ‘What plague in 1630?’ Anyone who has gone through the Italian school system, though, is aware of this historical event as it is described with an abundance of details in one of our literary masterpieces: I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. It was a horrible plague that hit Northern Italy and killed a large number of its population.
I found myself thinking about the many similarities between Covid and that plague…how people behaved, the suffering, the loss, the brave people who risked their lives to nurse others back to health…
So, at that moment, when I read that article, inspiration finally struck! I’ve always loved historical fiction and romance… therefore, I would write a romantic story set in Bergamo in the 1600s and it would feature that particular historical event, the plague of 1630, as an homage to all those people who perished in 2020 and all the ones who lost a family member.
And this is how ‘Beatrice’s fate’, my Covid book-baby, was born.