A House Near Luccoli

It's April 1681 and Alessandro Stradella - infamously excellent composer, musician, rogue and
revelation - is moving down in (but not out of) Genoese society.

Garibaldi is consilitory and expedient
in accomodating a friend and foe with
free and respectable lodgings. While
Donatella helps to clean the long
vacated third floor apartment, she
fondly recalls accompanying her
grandmother to the Christmas 1678
performance of La Forza dell'Amor
Paterno - especially the ovation of
falling sonnets, one of the taffeta
tied accolades brought to the stage
and as well presented as the hand-
some and personable Maestro taking
his bows (and such noble adolation?)
for granted.

Suddenly he is in and out of her everyday life! Of course Donatella is nothing like his usual female "associations", but
his need of a copyist and camouflage involve her in his inspired and insidious world - exciting and heartbreaking as she
is enlarged by his magnanimity and reduced by his missteps, realizing her own artistic and emotional potential when
friendship and something more challenges how far she will go.

A House Near Luccoli focuses on beautiful music, chance encounters, past possibilities, and the paradox of genius -
set amidst palaces, twisted alleyways and cozy rooms, against a mountain backdrop, looking out to sea and through
a window of opportunity for intimacy with one of the most distinguished, charismatic, talented, tragic and
undervalued figures of Italian Baroque musi c.

Donatella, unmarried by her mid-thirties, is
plainly irrelevant. Yet like the city she's
always and never lived in, there are hidden
longings in her - propriety the rule not cure
for what ails her. In a tall narrow house off
Genoa's la via Luccoli, she cares more for
her bedridden grandmother and cats than
an overbearing aunt, keeping house and
tending to a small terraced garden, in
idleness and hopelessness painting flowers
and waxing poetic in her journal. Their
landlord is Signor Garibaldi, one of the
managers of la Teatro Falcone in la Palazzo
Reale that recently dismissed the habitually
imprudent Stradella.