Romolo

Romola is a historical classic written by George Eliot and first published in 1863. Set in late fifteenth-century Italy, in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis, Romola is the most exotic and adventurous of George Eliot's novels. It charts the career and martyrdom of the charismatic religious leader Savonarola, who rebelled against the humanistspirit of the age and burned books on a "bonfire of vanities." With this story, Eliot brilliantly reconstructs in vivid detail a turning-point in the intellectual history of Europe.