PIECE ON PLACE: Gabrielle Kimm & The Castello Estense – a Character with no Dialogue
The second writer to give us their PIECE ON PLACE is historical fiction writer Gabrielle Kimm, who’ll tell us about her trip to Italy to visit the setting for her sultry & atmospheric first novel His Last Duchess (Little, Brown 2009), and also explain why a fortress in Ferrara came to play a central role in her story about what might really have happened to Browning’s ‘Last Duchess’.
‘A stunning debut, rich in historical detail, that explores women’s freedom, forbidden love, and the passions and people of 16th century Tuscany and Ferrara’– Irish Times
Gabrielle: I never expected the setting of my first novel to take its place in the book almost as a character in its own right – but in the end, that’s just what it did. In ‘His Last Duchess’, the bulk of the book plays out within the Castello Estense – the family seat of the Este dynasty in Ferrara, Northern Italy and, do you know, had I invented a place in which my complex, damaged, obsessive, controlling duke could live, I couldn’t possibly have come up with anywhere more suitable!
Situated in the heart of the city of Ferrara, the Castello Estense was built in 1385, and is a large, square, red-brick fortress, with a bulky tower at each corner and a black-watered moat right around the perimeter. It was built as a fortress, and it certainly looks the part.
My story explores the doomed marriage of the fifth duke of Ferrara – Alfonso d’Este – and his very young Medici-heiress bride, Lucrezia, and it was originally inspired by Robert Browning’s well known and delightfully sinister monologue, ‘My Last Duchess’. Once I had decided to tell this particular story, I had no choice about the location for my novel: the Castello Estense is where the Este dukes lived, and the Castello Estense is where Lucrezia disappeared from the records, and if I was to recount events accurately, this is where my book had to take place. I needed to know as much about this castle as I could. So I went to see it for myself. As you do.
Accompanied by my sister, I flew to Ferrara, arriving in the city after dark. We located our hotel, dumped our bags and went in search of the Castello straight away – I couldn’t wait! Rounding a corner, a few minutes from the hotel, we walked straight into it. Looming up out of the darkness, it was floodlit an eerie pale orange; I was gobsmacked. My sister laughed at me, as I walked slowly around the edge of the moat, mouth open, staring up at the place I had been ‘living’ in for months. It was perfect: huge and dark and, in the event, far more impressive even than I had imagined. I had seen photographs, of course, and studied floor plans, and I’d even watched the permanent webcam they have running there, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer bulk and impact of the place. It sits in its place in the city-centre like the Godfather at the head of the table, glaring around, silently daring anyone to defy him, and it’s quite clear the place hasn’t changed a scrap in five hundred years.
The following day, we did the tour of the inside of the Castello. It was a very strange experience for me to be there, imagining my characters in situ, trying to remove the noisy tourists from my mental image of the place, and picturing scenes from my story unravelling as I walked through.
The lightless dungeons in the castle lie below the level of the moat. My duke has a vivid memory of one terrible day in his childhood in these dungeons, so they were one place in the castle I was particularly keen to see for myself. The corridors get ever narrower as you go deeper underground, and the ceilings of the final passages are only about five foot high, so you have to stoop to walk along them. The door to the biggest dungeon is squat, iron-clad and well over a foot thick. You step down into the cell, which is vaulted and windowless (vents lead up to air above the waterlevel). The ceiling is covered in ancient graffiti – written in candle-smoke, I discovered – the final thoughts of those luckless individuals incarcerated in there. It was chilling – quite by chance I found myself totally alone in there. There was no attendant, and no other tourists. Just me. In that horrible, horrible place.
The Castello Estense plays a very central role in my book. I think that if it were an actor, it would be the one who manages to get that sought-after ‘and’ before their name in the credits, after all the other names have rolled. The one that stands out.
‘Gabrielle Kimm writes with a charm that entices us into a world of intrigue and dark undertones. She draws a skilful portrait of a fascinating time and place’ -Kate Furnivall, author of THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE
Gabrielle Kimm is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and the author of three historical novels, all published by Little, Brown – His Last Duchess in 2010, The Courtesan’s Lover in 2011 and The Girl With the Painted Face in 2013. Her books have been translated into eight languages.
