The Botticelli Secret

Florence looks like gold and smells like sulphur... In the colourful world of fifteenth-century Italy, Luciana Vetra is young and beautiful, a part-time model and full-time whore. When she is asked to pose as the goddess Flora for Sandro Botticelli's painting La Primavera, she is willing to oblige — until the artist abruptly sends her away without payment. Affronted, she steals an unfinished version of the painting — only to find that someone is ready to kill her to get it back. As friends and associates are murdered around her, Luciana turns to the one man who has never tried to exploit her beauty, Brother Guido della Torre, a novice at the monastery of Santa Croce. Fleeing Florence together, Luciana and Guido race through the nine great cities of Renaissance Italy, desperately trying to decode the painting's secrets before their enemies stop them.