Vittorio, The Vampire
1
WHO I AM, WHY I WRITE,
WHAT IS TO COME
WHEN I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my
arms the severed heads of my younger brother I and sister. They were
quick still, and mute, with big fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks,
and so horrified was I that I could make no more of a sound than they
could.
The dream came true.
But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried,
nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of
the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost
part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of
Italy.
By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful,
having lived five hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de'
Medici, and even the angels will attest to my powers, if you can get
them to speak to you. Be cautious on that point.
I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven of the
Articulate, " that band of strange romantic vampires in and from the
Southern New World city of New Orleans who have regaled you already
with so many chronicles and tales.
I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as
fiction. I know nothing of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of
Louisiana. You will find no new knowledge of them in these pages, not
even, hereafter, a mention.
I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of
my own beginnings�the fable of my making�and to cast this fragment of
my life in book form into the wide world, so to speak, where it may
come into some random or destined contact with their well-published
volumes.
I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant
roaming and study, never provoking the slightest danger from my own
kind, and never arousing their knowledge or suspicions.
But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.
It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I
believe I have revelations within me which will be wholly original to
you. Perhaps when my book is finished and gone from my hands, I may
take steps to become somehow a character in that grand roman-fleuve
begun by other vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I
cannot know or care about it.
As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones
of the place where I was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and
misshapen among the thorny blackberry vines and fragrant smothering
forests of oak and chestnut trees, I am compelled to record what befell
me, for it seems that I may have suffered a fate very unlike that of
any other vampire.
I do not always hang about this place.
On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city which for me
is the queen of all cities� Florence�which I loved from the very first
moment I saw it with a child's eyes in the years when Cosimo the Elder
ran his powerful Medici bank with his own hand, even though he was the
richest man in Europe.
In the house of Cosimo de' Medici lived the great sculptor Donatello
making sculptures of marble and bronze, as well as painters and poets
galore, writers on magic and makers of music. The great Brunelleschi,
who had made the very dome of Florence's greatest church, was building
yet another Cathedral for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo was
rebuilding not only the monastery of San Marco but commencing the
palazzo for Cosimo which would one day be known to all the world as the
Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo, men went all over Europe seeking in dusty
libraries long forgotten the classics of Greek and Rome, which Cosimo's
scholars would translate into our native Italian, the language which
Dante had boldly chosen many years before for his Divine Comedy.
And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a mortal boy of
destiny and promise�yes, I myself saw�the great guests of the Council
of Trent who had come from far Byzantium to heal the breach between the
Eastern and Western church: Pope Eugenius IV of Rome, the Patriarch of
Constantinople and the Emperor of the East himself, John VIII
Paleologus. These great men I saw enter the city in a terrible storm of
bitter rain, but nevertheless with indescribable glory, and these men I
saw eat from Cosimo's table.
Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no history of the
Medici. But let me only say that anyone who tells you that they were