Melania G. Mazzucco - Az építésznő

Plautilla has been struggling with a strange illness since she was a little girl: she falls asleep in the most unexpected situations. This makes him shy and withdrawn. His days are spent trying to comply with the whims of his eccentric father, who paints, plays music, writes comedies and poems in addition to being a mattress maker - a favorite target of critics, and the court doesn't even notice him. He wants at least his daughter to become a recognized artist, so he starts teaching her to paint. However, no matter how hard she works, as a woman of low birth, Plautilla cannot advance in the artistic world of Baroque Rome, dominated by Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. With the help of her strange friend, the unscrupulous abbot Elpidio Benedetti, she ends up going further than her father ever dreamed of: she plans and builds a villa on the slopes of Rome for the first time in the world as a woman.
In a great novel covering the entire society of the time, popes and courtiers, artists and connoisseurs, craftsmen and beggars swirl around Plautilla Bricci, whose life is full of renunciation and struggles, but it is not without tic pleasures and surprising turns. Melania Mazzucco not only paints a large-scale portrait of an extraordinary historical figure who has been almost completely forgotten until now, but also of the Eternal City in the contradictory, bigoted and debauched 17th century.

"We need this imagination so that those who were not given the right to be portrayed simply because they were women can become flesh-and-blood figures." Corriere della Sera

"I did my best to be firm but not violent; polite but not weak. I've already learned that women are judged by their appearance. Clothes, shoes, hairstyle, walk, everything is objectionable and everything matters. Maybe under the little veil, the feather on my hat is too frivolous, my face is too red, the perfume I use is too strong. I should have put on men's clothes, as Queen Christina used to, put on boots, wear shoulder-length hair, and show off my gray hair - in short, I had to I would have denied myself. But even then I would have been considered an anomaly."