Giovanni Petrarca: About
As the lady MP once famously said about another Member of Parliament; ”there is something of the night” about Giovanni, at least insofar as the team at theCafé is concerned.
Though he writes regularly on a variety of topics as his column will shortly show, all we really know about him is that he enjoys writing about erotica and the interplay between relationships, especially between men and women. His interests and research material lead us to suspect his origins and education might reflect the influences of the Balkans and the crucible of the old Danubian Principalities; the fault lines between the Ottomans and the Byzantium Empire – the Harem and the politics of power. Indeed it was some of the exchanges that he had with Michael that led to M’s development of the plot for his adventure project – The Byzantium Inheritance.
Insofar as we have been able to establish, given the name he chooses to write under for these columns, there are similarities, and maybe, even, connections – family and or culture – with the past; for example the name Petrarca: “In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”
And, in terms of ‘Giovanni’; in 1592, Giovanni Mocenigo, “addressed to the Father Inquisitor of Venice a letter containing charges of heresy against Giordano Bruno. Among other things, he alleged that Bruno had said “ that it is a great blasphemy to say, as Catholics do, that bread is changed to flesh; that he is hostile to the mass ; that no religion satisfies him ; that Christ was a good-for-nothing, and did wretched tricks to seduce the people, and ought to have been hanged…… he has denied that the Virgin could have borne a child; he asserted that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against the majesty of God; ….. that St. Thomas and all the doctors were blockheads compared with himself…” It is true also that at that time there was a great awareness of Greek and Roman thinkers such as Marcus Tullius Cicero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Dio Chrysostom, and Plutarch of Chaeronea who devoted their lives to the appreciation and practice of morality and virtue, values, and character when others of their ilk were more concerned with metaphysics and epistemology
Whosoever he is, and whatever his familial connections – or not – we think his ideas might be of interest to readers in terms of creativity and well-being. Giovanni’s current project – The Seraglio Game” is the first in a trilogy of what he intends as a slightly elegant erotic story in the manner of the Histoire d’O which Anne Desclos produced under the pen name Pauline Réage and won the French Literature prize Prix des Deux Magots in 1955 “.
We know that his voice is subtly accented and resonant; one of our ladies reported that she had difficulty paying attention to his topic because his voice was like having a cat lick warm honey from her ear! Whatever it is, it must work as the other girls, being from communities that are a little less tolerant than they now used to living amongst, have used some of our Resident Artist’s (Shena Parthab Taylor, BSc, MA) drawings for Giovanni’s work as illustrations of how they might like to be thought of – today at least!
