We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Floria
Opera lovers are no doubt familiar with the story of Tosca: a beautiful young singer leaps to her death from the walls of Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo after her lover, a painter, is executed due to the machinations of an evil baron. What in opera is essentially melodrama--however beautifully scored--becomes a gripping, intricate drama in Paola Capriolo's brilliant novel Floria Tosca. Capriolo retells this story from the villain's point of view, at the same time presenting it in historical context. The time is 1800, the place Rome, and Napoleon's armies are set on conquering Italy. Rather than focusing on the political derring-do of doomed painter Cavaradossi or his loyal paramour, Tosca, Capriolo turns her attention to Baron Scarpia, a police chief who tortures political prisoners and eventually sets in motion the lovers' deaths. Scarpia's complex character is slowly revealed through the auspices of his diary, a work that exposes not only his growing obsession with Tosca but also the dominant philosophies--both religious and social--of the times. In literature, a good villain can always outshine a worthy hero--witness the popularity of Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost--and this is certainly the case in Floria Tosca. Tosca and her painter might be heroic, but in choosing to focus on the wicked baron's twisted psyche, his ambivalence toward Tosca's charms, and his justification for the torture he imparts, Capriolo has created a fictional character that will live on in the reader's imagination long after the book has been read.
