Poetae Vulnerati Lunivernae : Wounded Poets of Luniverna

A literary historical fiction, slow-simmered in figs and wild herbs, steeped in mythicism, threaded with forbidden romances, and sprinkled with a faint gleam of magical realism.

Tuscany, 1492.
In the hill town of Luniverna, a year that begins with funerals sets in motion the slow unravelling of a powerful family – and the emergence of a forbidden love that will outlast fire, doctrine, and silence.

At the centre of Casa Bartolomei stands Alfeo, the reluctant patriarch, shaped by fear, inheritance, and the weight of unspoken crimes. Around him, the household tightens and daughters and sons marked by grief, women bound by duty, a Church eager to police bodies and belief.

And within this world, Miranda and Desideria find one another.

Their love unfolds quietly at first – through shared work, song, healing, and the language of herbs and ritual – before becoming a threat to everything the town claims to sanctify. As doctrine hardens into cruelty and secrets ignite into violence, the house itself becomes a crucible, testing what can survive when truth is named.

Woven through the novel are recurring symbols – the fig tree, fire, pendants, song, and the body as archive – tracing how love and trauma travel across generations, and how healing sometimes requires exile.

Poetae Vulnerati Lucivernae is a lyrical work of historical fiction that blends myth, ritual, and sensory prose to explore forbidden love, inherited silence, patriarchal violence, and the slow work of repair. It serves as a mythic prelude to the author’s memoir The Kintsugi Poet, imagining the ancestral ground from which a modern voice emerges.

This is a novel

love that refuses erasure

the cost of silence and the danger of sanctified cruelty

women who heal, sing, and remember

and the truth that what is broken can still be made whole

For readers of literary historical fiction, queer lineage stories, and novels that move between myth and memory.