First edition Rizzoli (2008), new edition Einaudi (2021).

Premio Bagutta 2009
Premio Scanno 2009
Premio Biblioteche di Roma 2009
Premio Tobino Viareggio 2011 Writer of the year

To celebrate Tintoretto’s 500 years since his birth, in Fall 2018 a gigantic exhibition opened in Venice (Palazzo Ducale and Accademia), in many european cities and at the National Gallery in Washington. Melania G. Mazzucco has also created and written the docu-film Tintoretto. A Rebel in Venice, in cinemas in 60 countries all over the world. Watch the trailer here. 

“Mazzucco comes across as a supple stylist with a strong sensory gift… Her narrative has an engaged intensity.”
The New York Times Book Review

“A marvel of emotion, construction and erudition. A masterly lesson in humanity and literature”. El País

“This moving confession immerses us in Renaissance Venice with stunning realism”. Le Nouvel Observateur

“A hard-to-forget female character.”
l’Espresso

A father and his beloved daughter, the teacher and the pupil who annulled herself in him: a female figure difficult to forget.

A rebellious and ambitious man, a restless and brilliant painter, Jacomo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, lived only for painting and sacrificed everything for his art (reputation, earnings, pleasures), driving away one by one – with the sole exception of the submissive Dominico – all his children: the females to a monastery, the males intolerant of his tyranny away from home. He ended up losing even his favourite natural daughter, Marietta, educated against the conventions of society to make her his most successful creation: a musician, a painter, a free woman. Dragging us into Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, sumptuous and cosmopolitan, threatened by the Turks and devastated by the plague, Melania G. Mazzucco paints a picture of a world at the height of its splendour yet presaging its decline, and gives readers the exciting tale of a total, absolute love.