M.R. LOVRIC

This novel centers on the erotic poetry the Roman poet Catullus wrote to a notoriously heartless woman named Clodia in c.63 B.C. Years later, in the 15th century, the poems turn up in Venice, where a German printer named Wendolin von Speyer publishes them--and they set into a motion a sequence of events that involve secret loves, witchcraft, marital troubles, and the downfall of a Clodia-like woman.

When I think of Venice as she was in 1782, I think of a hundred thousand souls all devoted to pleasure. Souls like that become insubstantial and faintly luminous. You see, we were in the phosphorescent stage of decay . . .Richly imagined and as irresistible as its magical setting, Carnevale evokes the three great loves of the painter Cecilia Cornaro: Casanova, Byron and La Serenissima herself.