Hello, Nico’s View of the World!

Welcome to my website, version 2.0, for my project-in-progress, a literary historical fiction titled Nico’s View of the World . This is the first post.

So why ‘ricordi’ instead of blog? Am I that pretentious?

Maybe. But the Renaissance Florentines were an exceptionally literary people, and there was a cultural tradition of keeping ‘ricordi’ — literally, ‘memories’ — notebooks to record things to remember, either personal or business-related, not exactly a ‘diary,’ but not unlike a log or commonplace book.

Machiavelli’s father kept a ricordi, which has survived, and from it we get many of the few details we have about Machiavelli’s childhood. I have spun up those details into my narrative, embellished I’ll admit, but anchored in this handful of facts.

Nico keeps a ricordi, but if Machiavelli did, it has not survived. Machiavelli wrote volumes of correspondence for his day job in the Florentine Chancery and there is a thick volume of his personal correspondence, which gives us significant documentation on his professional and private life, but these letters all come from 1498 or later. So though lost manuscripts are a common theme in that time and place, I have no information suggesting there is, in fact, a lost ricordi of Machiavelli. It is a pure fiction.

I am going to try to keep a ricordi of the project, too, where I intend to log my impressions of the progess of Nico through the revision process and towards whatever fate the Publishing Gods have in store.