The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence

Thanks St. Martins's and netgalley for this ARC.

Enlightenment, philosophy, and a maturity beyond her years makes Simonetta stand out from the start. An intimate view of the Medici’s and Florence's power struggle from within it's inner circle gives us a wider view of history. It's all about the people, republic, and how one woman may have changed history.

This is an intriguing interpretation about the life of Simonetta Cattaneo, a young, intelligent girl who became known as the "Most Beautiful Woman of Florence" and who developed a close, intimate relationship with the famous Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli.

It is a story about familial responsibilities, duty, strength, coming-of-age, friendship, art, passion, desire, loss and love.

Simonetta was a feminist ahead of her time who understood quickly that her beauty was both a gift and a curse, and who ultimately longed and strived in her regrettably short life to be known and loved for her knowledge and mind instead.

The prose is smooth and fluid, and the storyline takes us back to the mid-to-late 1400s to the city of Florence when politics, learning and the liberal arts were revered and who you knew was certainly more important than what you knew.

This certainly is a well written, vivid, rich story, and even though there is not much known about Simonetta's life and the events that led up to Botticelli's immortalization of her in his famous painting, Palombo has done a remarkable job of taking those historical facts and surrounding them with fiction that is passionate, alluring and incredibly captivating.

Thank you to NetGalley, especially St. Martin's Press, for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a short work, taking me just a few hours to read, and it’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to say that there’s not much of a happy ending. But in that short, and sad, time, Palombo builds a wonderful portrait of Simonetta, a naive young woman who arrives in Florence only to find that all she desires comes with a price.

At its heart, this short novel focuses on the idea that beauty simply isn’t enough, and certainly isn’t sustainable. The Medici, for all their patronage of the arts, most definitely found that to be the case. And while The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence isn’t much of a high brow historical exploration of the fact, it’s still a well crafted piece of historical fiction, and I definitely found myself swept up in the romance of it all – true to history or not.