The Ultimate Challenge
In February 2016, I was in Florence, figuring out how best to weave Mary’s story into the city as it was 486 years ago, in 1530. That's when Michelangelo went into hiding in fear for his life, unsure whether he would live or die at the hands of a trained assassin funded by the mighty Medici.
Fortunately, Florence is Mary’s home-away-from-home, and her knowledge of Michelangelo’s era is encyclopedic, so she set me off on a good start. With her story treatment in hand, I walked the city, and walked it again. I wore out a pair of shoes (luckily Camper was having a sale that week so I stocked up on more). What’s more, I wore out my hips (you’ll recall I’d had major surgery only six months before, and was still recovering).
I visited every museum and site Mary suggested…and then some. I befriended a Michelangelo scholar, Paola Angelini of Guided Florence Tours, who took me into the mind of the great sculptor as we visited each of his masterpieces. She helped me jump queues and got me past the gatekeepers into off-the-beaten-track places little known to tourists. I visited every work by Michelangelo that Florence can claim. I drank a lot of espresso. I ate a lot of pasta.
Then I started to play with Mary’s tale, rearranging a bit here, removing a bit more there; expanding on this, cutting back on that. The raw materials were so good, a great city turned into my sandbox; Mary’s storyline became my magic wand.
This is why I love what I do. It’s not without effort, but what a pleasure to become so intimate with a place, story, and character. You have to in order to somehow inhabit their time and voice. You have to steep yourself in their place. Mary had already done so, and now it was my turn.
From the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign in June 2015, and throughout my convalescence, I read everything I could get my hands on about Michelangelo, The Medici, and David. Most of my references were recommended by Mary, so I jumped right in, building on the knowledge she had developed over years.
