Love, Power, and Resistance in Renaissance Bologna

Wendy reviews books set in Italy. For more articles like this one, subscribe to her Substack channel Italy Writers and get in touch via Sunflower Publishing. Read more.

In City of Silk, Glennis Virgo stitches together a tale as intricate and enduring as the brocades that grace her story’s pages. Look, this isn’t just another “Oh wow, history but with a woman protagonist!” book. It’s more like someone kicked open the museum doors and handed the microphone to all the voices history shoved in the back closet. Serious respect for that. The story’s got guts and heart, weaving together a sharp little love letter to anyone who’s ever found a way to claw out something beautiful from a world determined to keep them on their knees.

And about Bologna in 1575? Forget grand Firenze or that bedazzled Venice everyone’s always raving about, this book rolls you right into the marrow of Bologna. Not the postcard shots, but the real spots: orphanages where secrets simmer, tailors’ shops that buzz with gossip and ambition, and these narrow streets where you’d probably lose your shoes—and maybe your lunch—just trying to get home when the fog rolls in. It’s a city built on contradictions: you’ve got silk brushing against raw stone, incense curling over the stink of sweat, and every promise seems to come with its own shadow of trouble. Real place, real mess, and yeah, that’s where this thing absolutely lives. It is rendered not as backdrop but as character, its canals and churches bearing silent witness to the quiet revolutions unfolding in the lives of women who refuse to be forgotten.

At the centre of it all is Elena Morandi, first introduced not as a fully-formed heroine, but as a name on an application—a ten-year-old girl subject to a list of conditions so exacting it feels more like an indictment than a form of admission:

“Lacking both father and mother. From a respectable artisan family… She must be obedient and not considered lazy or a gossip. She must be verified as a virgin.”

She is admitted to the orphanage of Santa Maria del Baraccano, a place ostensibly built for protection but housing secrets darker than its red-brick walls suggest. What unfolds from this point is a story of survival, yes—but also of skill, of sisterhood, of the quiet and persistent act of becoming.

Elena picked up needlework from her dad, right there on his knee. That skill? It’s basically all she owns. Well, that and a stubborn streak a mile wide. As she gets older, all she wants is to be a tailor, but nope, society’s got other plans. Women aren’t supposed to have those dreams, apparently. Ridiculous, I know. Her first gigs were in Signora Ruffo’s workroom—picture it: endless clatter of scissors, gossip louder than the sewing machines, a weirdly comforting chaos. That’s where you get your first look at what real Renaissance sewing looked like, not that painterly nonsense. Virgo’s prose here is sumptuous, sensory, and steeped in authenticity:

“The loudest sound was that of shears sliding through silk… the afternoons a swirl of female chatter and gossip… a painted screen—its design of mulberry trees a constant reminder of the source of the city’s wealth…”

But life in Ruffo’s genteel salon is not safe for long. A marriage is arranged. Elena flees. Her sanctuary becomes Maestro Rondinelli’s workshop—an atelier governed by rules, precision, and masculinity. Here, despite her skills, she is made to serve rather than sew. Her ambition simmers quietly. But so, too, does her rage.

This is where the novel begins to shift into darker territory. The reintroduction of Antonio Della Fontana, a wealthy patron with a sordid history, brings with it a chilling tension. Virgo never sensationalises the sexual violence Elena and others endure—she handles it with restraint, offering just enough detail to stir discomfort without exploitation. In doing so, she forces the reader to feel the weight of complicity—the silence of others, the willingness of institutions to shield powerful men, the way harm is normalised and hidden behind velvet curtains and gilded doors.

“Once Fontana had turned the key, no one would ever come… his hands would wander over the body before him, until he could restrain himself no longer.”

Elena’s friend Laura suffers gravely at Fontana’s hands. Her story is devastating and, tragically, not uncommon in the world Virgo describes. But it is Elena’s reaction, her drive not simply to avenge but to unmask, that gives the novel its heartbeat. The line between justice and revenge is finely drawn here, and Virgo never offers easy answers. Instead, she allows the moral complexity to speak for itself:

Is Elena seeking justice, or is it vengeance? And must they be mutually exclusive in a city where men like Fontana “own justice” itself?

What gives the novel such texture is the rich interplay of characters who surround Elena. Sofia, a Black seamstress, is quietly revolutionary in her own way. Once sold into slavery in West Africa, she now works with discipline and grace, her race making her a target of whispered disdain among the wealthy women who frequent the shop:

“Sofia sews a good, straight seam… but if she came too close, the ladies would effect a shudder.”

Maestro Rondinelli is one of the novel’s most layered male figures. He’s not some mustache-twirling bad guy, but you definitely wouldn’t call him a hero either. Just a regular man trying to wade through the cesspool with a shred of decency—problem is, guys like Fontana have a chokehold on everything, and even the best intentions get chewed up. He tries, sure, but the system’s got teeth, and he’s only human. His dismissal of Elena is one of the book’s most heartbreaking moments, because it feels all too real. It is the moment when moral intent is strangled by financial dependency:

“Unless I dismiss you immediately, he will withdraw his custom and blacken my name throughout the city.”

But Virgo, kind of like Elena, isn’t just rolling over and taking fate as it comes. Elena throws on some men’s clothes and sneaks back into the workshop undercover—which, by the way, isn’t just a slick plot move, it’s her way of snatching back what’s hers and flipping the script on all those old “you can’t sit with us” rules. The whole bit about using gender like some kind of mask—sometimes dead obvious, sometimes more under the radar—hits hard. It’s got that wink to Shakespeare cross-dressing hijinks but keeps itself grounded, not sliding off into total fantasy land.So here’s the thing—Elena’s got her own drama, her own mission, and just when you think it’s about to turn all sappy, bam, it throws this curveball of real, honest-to-God feeling right in your face. It’s not some cheesy fairytale with a knight in shining armor galloping in. It’s raw, hard-won tenderness sneaking in between the cracks, like it actually belongs there instead of being shoehorned in for the sake of a love plot. It feels real. Kinda hurts in a nice way and what we find instead is a kind of mutual recognition between equals. It is all the more moving for its restraint.

Why I Recommend This Book

It’s one of those rare reads that grabs you by the collar, drags you into the cobblestone streets, and doesn’t let you go till the end. Glennis Virgo? She’s got guts. The way she tells a story, there’s no sugarcoating or fluff—just raw, honest-to-goodness life, with all the mess and heartbreak. And, trust me, you feel it.

Now, Bologna… the city’s practically breathing, nosy and alive, right there with the snot-nosed kids in the orphanages, the cramped workshops that probably smell like sweat and wood shavings, and those foggy little canals winding everywhere. You can almost taste the damp air, feel the grit under your fingernails. The details—Virgo’s got this knack for turning the tiniest slice of life (a scrap of silk, the way a candle throws shadows on the wall, that thick, gloomy winter fog)—into magic. She paints with words, and man, it works.

“A November fog had crept up from the canals during the night and wrapped itself around the city like a caul… swirling like curds in whey…”

Her use of Italian vocabulary throughout—sbirri, battibecco, cartolaio—feels neither forced nor performative. It roots the narrative, reminding us of its geography, its specificity. This is a novel that wears its research lightly but confidently, bringing the Bolognese silk trade to life without ever descending into textbook history. It inspires curiosity without condescension.

The author’s note at the end is particularly resonant. While Elena and Laura are fictional, Virgo draws inspiration from real artists of the period and from artefacts such as Il Tagliapanni—Moroni’s arresting portrait of a tailor—which sparked the creation of Maestro Rondinelli. The past, Virgo suggests, is not simply something we visit. In the end, we’re tipping our hats to all those invisible voices—folks whose stories never even made it to the page.

If you’re the kind of reader who needs characters that feel things deeply, or you love watching women grab hold of their own lives, sometimes without shouting about it—City of Silk is gonna hit different. This book sticks with you. Seriously, it hangs in your memory like the smell of vintage threads warmed by sunshine, or ghostly footsteps slipping away into the mist.

An extraordinary debut. One can only hope Glennis Virgo is already at work on her next.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
— L.P. Hartley

This article was adapted from my original review published on Sunflower Publishing.