The Florentine

Marc Campford writes at a kitchen table beside a north-facing window, with a pot of coffee that always goes cold and a shelf of reference books whose spines have long since lost their titles. He drafts in longhand, types the pages up the next morning, and reads every chapter aloud at least once to hear where a sentence trips.

His love of the Renaissance began with account books rather than paintings. He once came across a merchant’s ledger in translation: wine, wool, candles, a loan repaid late, a debt quietly left alone. He noticed how much of a life shows in what a person paid for, and what they did not. Since then he reads household accounts, letters, guild rules and old city regulations the way other people read novels, hunting for the small human detail that never made the chronicles.

Between books he walks a great deal, keeps a notebook of street names and the price of bread, cooks from translated recipes (with mixed results) and works through Italian one slow lesson at a time. He is fond of rainy afternoons, good paper and long dinners, and he is already turning over the next story.