Romola - Part 1

Set in late fifteenth-century Italy, in the Renaissance Florence of Machiavelli and the Medicis, Romola ( 1862-3) is the most exoticand adventurous of George Eliot's novels. It reconstructs a turning-point in the intellectual history of Europe by charting the career and martyrdom of the charismatic religious leader Savonarola, who rebelled against the humanist spirit of the age and burned books on a 'bonfire of vanities'.