Born in New Jersey, Gina Buonaguro currently resides in Toronto, Canada. Her most recent historical novel The Virgins of Venice won first place in the 2023 Chaucer Early Historical Fiction Awards, and she is currently working on her next. Previously, she coauthored six novels with the writer Janice Kirk.
TRYING IT ALL by Gina Buonaguro
As the sole author or coauthor of four historical novels, I have included real historical figures as main characters in 50% of them. These were not conscious choices but rather where the creative process led.
In my first novel, The Sidewalk Artist, a real-life historical figure just strode into the book out of nowhere and inspired the titular character: the Renaissance artist Raphael. My original idea for the novel, my very first and started in the very early 2000s, was a travelogue where a Bridget-Jonesy aspiring novelist meets a sidewalk artist. My writing friend Janice Kirk contributed so many ideas that we decided to coauthor it. It was she who dreamt up what the sidewalk artist was drawing in Paris: Raphael’s famous little cherubs from his Sistine Madonna. Voila - we were off to the races! Our novel then became a book-within-a-book or perhaps a dual timeline, depending on who you think the sidewalk artist really is. Is he truly Raphael or a clever and talented con artist?
By the conclusion of writing The Sidewalk Artist, I became hooked on reading and writing historical fiction. And so our next coauthored work was Ciao Bella, our World War II novel (doesn’t every historical fiction author have one?). This time, the creative process took us in an entirely new direction and the finished product includes almost no real-life people. We certainly allude to many, including Hitler and Mussolini, but the only one to actually appear, and only in flashbacks, is an obscure Canadian surgeon named Norman Bethune. Dr. Bethune was basically a literary device to have our protagonist, Grace (called Graziella once she ends up in Italy), leave Toronto and travel to Europe. But we specifically wanted to write about Italy, and most specifically the Veneto region. However, we could not figure out any plausible reason why a young Canadian woman with no Italian heritage would end up near Venice on the verge of WW2. And so at Dr. Bethune’s behest, Grace and her brother volunteer to fight for the Republican cause in Franco’s Spain. There she ends up meeting her future husband Ugo and moving to Italy with him to be with his family as the world descends into war. Dr. Bethune never appears again, because in real life he died of sepsis in China in 1939 and Ciao Bella takes place in the summer after WW2, when millions of displaced people attempted to find their ways home.
Even though we included almost no real-life people in Ciao Bella, we were very cognizant that real-life readers might be alive to remember and correct us on the very complicated history of northern Italy during WW2, so we decided to return to the Renaissance for our third historical novel, The Wolves of St. Peter. For this one, we chose a third way to approach historical figures by making Michelangelo, Pope Julius II, banker Agostino Chigi, and others of the time into minor characters. We also could not resist including Raphael again, although this time he too was minor. The protagonist was inspired by a passing reference to some of the servants Michelangelo brought from Florence to help him paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - an unnamed houseboy. So we gave him a name and an interesting backstory: Francesco, who is much too old to be a houseboy and is in Rome to learn some life lessons, although he ends up solving a murder mystery. This approach gave us license to have Francesco do anything we wanted him to, within the confines of what is known about Michelangelo’s life and whereabouts in 1508.
After the publication of Wolves, Janice and I had planned a sequel but amicably parted ways before we could write it. Having conducted an immense amount of research on 16th-century Venice, I knew I wanted to use that knowledge to illuminate the lives of women lost to history. I took a similar approach as Ciao Bella for The Virgins of Venice, the story of two patrician sisters who must follow one of two life paths, marriage or convent. Again, I refer to many historical figures, including Pope Julius II and Venetian diarist Marin Sanudo, while two minor characters were inspired by actual people, much like our too-old houseboy Francesco in Wolves. One is the black gondolier featured prominently in Vittore Carpaccio’s painting The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross. Carpaccio is known to have painted Venice extremely accurately, and so we can assume the black gondolier with his red cap and jaunty white feather was a real man. The other inspiration was for my courtesan La Diamante, whom I model after the real courtesan Veronica Franco.
When discussing my next novel with my editor, she was especially interested in the story of Veronica Franco herself, who was not only a courtesan but also an accomplished poet. And so I have found myself writing my only strictly biographical novel (first draft completed but still untitled with edits to come). It has been an interesting and challenging experience.
There is no doubt that Veronica Franco was a fascinating woman. But it took me a very long while to find my entry into the book, which required playing with a few key dates as well as figuring out the arc of the most interesting points of her life and fashioning that into a compelling narrative that’s not just an encyclopedic dump but rather a story that people want to read. I pride myself on historical accuracy and dates (The Virgins of Venice sticks to the exact dates and events as described by the diarist Sanudo) but to do so strictly with Veronica made for either boring or disjointed reading. Most importantly, I needed to figure out what truly motivated her, beyond any superficial analyses, which required really delving into her writings (consisting of poems, letters, multiple wills, and Inquisition testimony). Ultimately, I have found this Veronica novel to be the most difficult way to approach a historical novel due to what feels to me like so many creative constraints.
So what approach will I take with my next book, once I’m finished with Veronica, one I’m already thinking about? Most likely a similar one to Ciao Bella and The Virgins of Venice, where I take a deep dive into an actual historical setting but create fictional characters to navigate their way through it, with a few cameo appearances by some real-life historical figures. For me, this allows for the most creative expression while still honouring the genre that I love so much.
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