In May 1624 a father accompanies his eight-year-old daughter to Santa Severa beach, north of Rome. There, a few months earlier, a chimerical creature ran aground. A whale. Until the day of that discovery, no whales had ever appeared on the coasts of Italy. That’s why the man is there. He wants his daughter to understand that even what is beyond our horizon exists.
Giovanni Briccio is a plebeian genius, opposed by the literati and ignored by the court: he is a mattress-maker, a painter of scant fame, a popular playwright, actor and poet, and hidden behind so many pseudonyms, a successful journalist and writer of ballads, songs, and crime stories. The child is his younger daughter, Plautilla.
Briccio wants to make her the total artist he has failed to become. He teaches her about painting, mathematics, science. He also imposes upon her the destiny of virginity, launching her as a child prodigy, whom the Madonna has chosen as her messenger. Plautilla, however, is doubly disadvantaged as a female and of humble origins. She struggles in Rome’s artistic circles, dominated by the genius of Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, and conditioned by the patronage of the Barberini family. Her father’s overbearing presence forces her to sacrifice her youth.
But the meeting with Elpidio Benedetti, a young aspiring writer, will eventually change their life. Benedetti was chosen by the all-powerful Cardinal Barberini among the family’s clients to act as secretary to a diplomat whom Pope Urban VIII wanted to get out of the way. That diplomat is Giulio Mazzarino, and he keeps Benedetti at his service. Mazzarino’s prodigious rise to the French court will make Elpidio, the awkward son of an embroiderer, a very powerful agent among the artists of Rome – at once an art dealer, trafficker and client.
Plautilla Bricci and Elpidio Benedetti, both apparently unarmed due to the dangers of the court, will become the most extravagant couple of seventeenth-century Rome. She a virgin, he an abbot, both of them held to chastity to safeguard the only treasure they possess. They must hide and officially ignore each other for twenty-five years, surviving the Barberini ruin, regime changes, the plague, and Mazzarino’s death, until they can embark on an enterprise that crowns the dream of a lifetime: the construction of a Villa designed, planned and executed by the woman. The first female architect of modern history.
In the summer of 1849, among the ruins of that villa – which would become the last outpost of the resistance due to its strategic position – the dream of a generation of twenty-year-old Italians, volunteers who came to Rome to save the achievements of the revolution of 1848, died out. Students, artists and children from good families who found themselves defending up to the last the fragile and lightning-quick experiment of the democratic Roman Republic, the first to recognize equality and freedom in its constitution.
L’architettrice is the story of two people’s dreams of changing the world – because whales exist, even if they do not swim in our sea.
