Asensi’s story centers on the unlikely trio of Vatican paleographer Sister Ottavia Salina, Vatican Swiss Guard Captain Kaspar Glauser-Roïst, and a Coptic Catholic archeologist, Farag Boswell. The three are brought together because of the murder of a mysterious Ethiopian man who was covered with elaborate and enigmatic tattoos. Sister Salina is called upon by Vatican potentates and Glauser-Roïst to divine the meaning of the dead man’s body art. Shady Vatican officials inform Salina that the dead Ethiopian was part of a conspiracy to steal the Ligna Crucis, pieces of The True Cross, from churches where the religious relics were kept. As the story blooms, the Holy Father charges Salina, Glauser-Roïst, and the added academic Boswell to retrieve the relics.
The story winds its way through an already well-worn path of the Vatican Library intrigue, leading to the discovery of a secret society called the Staurofilakes, who have sought The True Cross throughout history and seem to be accumulating the slivers of wood from all over the world. Glauser-Roïst, an Italian Scholar, notes that there exist clues to the Staurofilakes hidden in Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, the second triptych of his Divine Comedy. The three learn that Dante himself was a member of the group and hid the group’s initiation ritual in the densely written poetics of the Purgatorio, an act that earned Dante a four year exile.
The trio sets out to replicate the instructions gleaned from the Purgatorio, a process that takes them to several continents, each enduring Dante’s poetic path to perfection through the writer’s seven terraces of Purgatory, where each searcher is rendered unconscious and tattooed once each terrace is accomplished. By the end of the story, all three have acquired all of the tattoos found on the murdered Ethiopian. Along the way, the cleric Salina falls in love with the agnostic Boswell, testing her 40-year dedication to the Church.
Asensi puts perhaps (and perhaps not) a fine point on the misogyny of the Vatican in detailing the shabby treatment of Salina. This is my only quibble with the book’s tone, the same one I have with Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent and India Hill’s Queenmaker. The tone is not so much revisionist (not at all) as it is browbeating, prompting me to think, “Okay, I get the point.”
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1 - The Candid Professor
The Hypnerotomachia is not a manuscript.