BIANCA'S CURE

In 1558, 10-year-old Bianca Capello watches helplessly as her mother dies from malaria. Prevented by her aunts from administering any of the experimental cures for malaria her mother had been working on, Bianca vows to take up her mother’s work. In an annex of her father’s palace, Bianca secretly begins to develop medicines based upon her mother’s belief in the healing powers of artemisia, a flowering wormwood plant. At 15, Bianca finds herself employed in the Sick House run by nuns, hoping to test out her fledgling “cures.” But when her father learns of her work, he locks her up in his country estate. With the aid of her servant, she meets Piero, a young clerk for the Salviati bank in Florence. Florence is Medici territory, and the family is known to practice alchemy, the very skill Bianca needs to purify her plants for medicinal use. Piero is her ticket out of Venice, even if it means she must marry him. In Florence she meets Francesco I de’ Medici, heir to the grand duke of Tuscany. This meeting proves to be the beginning of a grand love affair that survives her marriage to Piero as well as Francesco’s later marriage into Habsburg royalty. Although Berardi’s novel is centered mostly on the scandalous relationship between Bianca and Francesco, the real story here is Bianca’s relentless efforts to find a cure for malaria. She’s depicted as an independent woman willing to stand up to the male establishment at all costs. Her deepest passion is for her “science,” a word repeated with exhausting frequency throughout the narrative. However, Berardi also fills her tale with fascinating historical nuggets about the Medici family, noting the unusual number of family deaths due to arsenic poisoning. The author meticulously tracks Bianca’s experiments, from the way she grows her artemisia and various herbs, to her preparations and delivery of her potions to those desperate enough to try her untested mixtures.