the architecture of secrets: how we keep Italy’s past alive

Italy wears her secrets beautifully. Find them in the cracks of a marble floor, in the chipped edge of a fresco and in the hush that falls between church bells tolling. She is a country built not on perfection, but on confession. A place where truth and beauty coexist, decaying, alive and divine.

For me, Italy is not a backdrop. She’s a living, heaving organism. A mirror that reflects the inner architecture of human choice. A connection felt in my bones, every time I step off the plane and breathe in my heritage.

inspiration for the serpent book universe

The Serpent books was born in her shadows, literally in Rapallo’s sea breeze, heavy with promise and literary memory. Rapallo is the perfect writer’s muse, and has been for centuries. I feel privileged that my writing path began there too.

Inspiration for the books and the families who live in their pages, arrived in a dream on a family holiday. Artistic license and soft vision brought my Italian motherland to you, as a supporting character for glory and sadness.

Venice. Just her name inspires thoughts of mystery and intrigue. Of stories told, and those waiting to unfold. In truth, how could I not bring her into the serpent family fold?

I bent Venice’s light, golden and soft, into something deceitful; capable of turning truth into guilt and anchoring deceit into the guise of protection. Why? Because the smooth needs the rough to know it is smooth.

Every scene written in these places began not with dialogue or plot, but with a sound and a feeling. Footsteps on cobblestone. A whisper that might have been a prayer. And then, the silence. Because silence holds a different feeling.

There is a certain kind that doesn’t ask to be broken. It hums through cathedrals, spills into courtyards and seeps beneath locked doors.

The families in The Serpent Trilogy live within that silence. They inherit it the way others inherit land or bloodlines. In the walls they build around themselves, in the way they speak and particularly, in what they don’t say.

how Italy creates the perfect backdrop

Italy’s architecture has always fascinated me because it understands human nature, sometimes better than we do. Every column has a story. Every fresco speaks a testimony. Grand structures hold public and private stories of determination, bravery and fear.

The country’s grandeur isn’t in its perfection but in its endurance and the way it holds both faith and failure in the same frame. When I write, I try to do the same: to show that love can be sacred and ruinous, that betrayal can be an act of devotion and that truth can feel like both liberation and loss.

Perhaps that’s what draws me to Italy’s contrast and beauty — the comfort in knowing that nothing survives without first being broken. Here, ruins are not reminders of what was lost, but proof of what remains. Proof that we can too achieve and create legacies, if the essence of it is true and strong. 

Italy as destiny

Italy asks me to remember who we are and what we have buried to survive. For the Salucci family, it’s the birthplace of love and the cost of truth. For the rest of us, may it be a reminder that destiny isn’t chosen, it’s inherited.

The characters in The Serpent Books negotiate every doorway as a threshold between past and present. Between what they’ve buried and what refuses to stay lay down in silence.

They move through spaces shaped by centuries of prayer, rebellion and promise, with fate and destiny in their minds. Yet their lives were built, quite literally, on the bones of history, where stories of place and time are anchored in their DNA.

When readers ask me why I chose Italy, I often say: Italy chose me. She called through her contradictions and her familiarity.

Her reverence for art, her appetite for sin. Her loyalty to family, her surrender to beauty. In her, I found a geography of consequence and a moral landscape as intricate as any painted cathedral ceiling. And I relished in it like our vital breath.

This is the architecture of secrets that holds my writing world together. It’s the quiet scaffolding of truth beneath the gilded surface. A reminder that every story, like every building, relies on what cannot be seen.

However, our conversations are not one sided. Italy plays her role too. She keeps the past alive not through preservation, but through possession. I found, once I walked her streets and felt her embrace, she never let me go.