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Young Adults

O armiño dorme

By Xosé Antonio Neira Cruz

About this book

Bia de Nedici, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Florence recalls the last days of her life. Being a woman is not easy in the 16th century. Outside the golden cage that is her palace, the world is full of dangers but also full of freedom. Love enters Bia's cage and everything changes.

Book fragment

When in 1857 there was an agreement to open the graves of the Medicis to check the state of the sepulchres in the chapel of the Princes, some sort of superstitious fear invaded the inhabitants of the city. For some it was respect for the memory of the old lords of Tuscany, for others is was precisely that wish to leave behind that past of domination and despotism, deeply buried, that led them to insist over and over that the sarcophagus of the Medicis remain sealed. Otherwise, the ghosts of that family of enriched bankers could become flesh again, after their history of mixing their blood with the royalty in Europe and thus becoming nobles, only to become suddenly extinct without any heirs in 1743.

The mistrust on both sides was increased as a rumour of a long forgotten history was spread by some unknown person (...). According to this legend, which was then on the lips of everyone, the Medicis had died of a disease that was transmitted through sexual intercourse, blood, saliva and even breathing and that caused the victims to be sterile first and then feeble, until after some years they developed some kind of invisible leprosy and finally madness.