La arquitectriz

One day in 1624, a father takes his daughter to the beach of Santa Severa to see the remains of a chimerical creature, a stranded whale. The father, Giovanni Briccio, called the Briccio, treasures in his desk a tooth of that whale, which later her daughter, Plautilla, will keep all her life, along with the indelible memory of the animal that she saw as a child on that beach. We are in the Rome of baroque splendor, the Rome of the popes, the Rome of Bernini and Pietro da Cortona, the Rome of intrigue, fanaticism, violence, pomp, debauchery and plague. Giovanni is a painter, playwright and musician. Plautilla is his second daughter, less graceful than the first-born, but destined to be an important woman. Her father will educate her in the art of painting and she will end up becoming an architect, the first female architect in modern history. Now, in her maturity, Plautilla evokes her life: her decisive meeting with Abbot Elpidio Benedetti, her patron and lover, who would become Mazarin's secretary; the construction of Il Vascello, the splendid ship-shaped villa that rises on one of the hills of Rome and whose authorship she will not be recognized at first...