THE PIRATE PRINCE OF GENOA

Marmorstein offers a fictionalized account of the life of 16th-century naval admiral and Genoese politician Andrea Doria.

The author anchors this story to a single night late in Doria’s life, when it nearly ended. On Jan. 2, 1547, octogenarian Doria, an influential political leader in the Italian Republic of Genoa in Italy, regales his family and holiday visitors with adventure tales. He recounts his rise to military fame and his alliances with kings and popes. He boasts of how, as the defender of Genoa, he initially worked with the French and ultimately with the Spanish when, in 1528, Spanish King Charles V offered the city both protection and independence. Doria announced the agreement to an adoring city, but he refused to be named the doge of the republic. Unofficially, however, he’d ruled the city ever since. Gian Luigi Fieschi, a supposed friend, is present for these stories but then leaves Doria’s villa to start a rebellion he had been planning for months. Marmorstein ingeniously uses a storytelling framework to tell a vivid tale of Doria’s life and times; he does not, however, simply provide a hagiography, as his use of the omniscient voice allows for other perspectives, including some that contradict Doria’s. The author also enlivens the holiday gathering with sumptuous descriptions of the wines, foods such as canestrelli cookies, and the lush furnishings of the Doria villa. He weaves an enjoyable tale, but one wonders how it fits into the Mentoris Project series, which aims to provide novels about important historical figures who can inspire readers to “make a positive contribution to society.” Doria helped free Genoa from French rule but was hardly a man to emulate; he enslaved captives, abandoned towns to enemies, and ruthlessly controlled his city for more than three decades.

An entertaining historical novel about a complicated figure.