Anne Rice
 Vittorio, The Vampire
  
  
  
  
  
  
   DEDICATION BY ANNE RICE
  This novel is dedicated to Stan, Christopher, Michele and Howard; to Rosario and 
Patrice; to Pamela and Elaine; and to Niccolo.
  This novel is dedicated by Vittorio to the people of Florence, Italy.
  
  
  1
  WHO I AM, WHY I WRITE, WHAT IS TO COME
  
  WHEN I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my arms the severed 
heads of my younger brother I and sister. They were quick still, and mute, with big 
fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was I that I could make no more of 
a sound than they could. The dream came true.
  But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five 
centuries of time. I am a vampire.
  My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined 
mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most 
beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.
  By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful, having lived five 
hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even the angels will attest 
to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be cautious on that point.
  I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven of the Articulate", that band 
of strange romantic vampires in and from the Southern New World city of New Orleans who 
have regaled you already with so many chronicles and tales.
  I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as fiction. I know nothing 
of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You will find no new knowledge 
of them in these pages, not even, hereafter, a mention.
  I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of my own beginnings - 
the fable of my making - and to cast this fragment of my life in book form into the wide 
world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or destined contact with their 
well-published volumes.
  I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant roaming and study, 
never provoking the slightest danger from my own kind, and never arousing their knowledge 
or suspicions.
  But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.
  It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I believe I have 
revelations within me which will be wholly original to you. Perhaps when my book is 
finished and gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow a character in that 
grand roman-fleuve begun by other vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I 
cannot know or care about it.
   As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones of the place where I 
was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and misshapen among the thorny blackberry 
vines and fragrant smothering forests of oak and chestnut trees, I am compelled to record 
what befell me, for it seems that I may have suffered a fate very unlike that of any 
other vampire. I do not always hang about this place.
  On the contrary, I spend most of my time in that city which for me is the queen of all 
cities - Florence - which I loved from the very first moment I saw it with a child's eyes 
in the years when Cosimo the Elder ran his powerful Medici bank with his own hand, even 
though he was the richest man in Europe.
  In the house of Cosimo de' Medici lived the great sculptor Donatello making sculptures 
of marble and bronze, as well as painters and poets galore, writers on magic and makers 
of music. The great Brunelleschi, who had made the very dome of Florence's greatest 
church, was building yet another Cathedral for Cosimo in those days, and Michelozzo was 
rebuilding not only the monastery of San Marco but commencing the palazzo for Cosimo 
which would one day be known to all the world as the Palazzo Vecchio. For Cosimo, men 
went all over Europe seeking in dusty libraries long forgotten the classics of Greek and 
Rome, which Cosimo's scholars would translate into our native Italian, the language which 
Dante had boldly chosen many years before for his Divine Comedy.
   And it was under Cosimo's roof that I saw, as a mortal boy of destiny and promise - 
yes, I myself saw - the great guests of the Council of Trent who had come from far 
Byzantium to heal the breach between the Eastern and Western church: Pope Eugenius IV of 
Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor of the East himself, John VIII 
Paleologus. These great men I saw enter the city in a terrible storm of bitter rain, but 
nevertheless with indescribable glory, and these men I saw eat from Cosimo's table.
  Enough, you might say. I agree with you. This is no history of the Medici. But let me 
only say that anyone who tells you that they were scoundrels, these great men, is a 
perfect idiot. It was the descendants of Cosimo who took care of Leonardo da Vinci, 
Michelangelo and artists without count. And it was all because a banker, a moneylender if 
you will, thought it splendid and good to give beauty and magnificence to the city of 
Florence.
  I'll come back to Cosimo at the right point, and only for a few brief words, though I 
must confess I am having trouble being brief here on any score, but for now let me say 
that Cosimo belongs to the living. I have been in bed with the dead since 1450.
  Now to tell how it began, but allow me one more preface.
  Don't look here, please, for antique language. You will not find a rigid fabricated 
English meant to conjure castle walls by stilted diction and constricted vocabulary. I 
shall tell my tale naturally and effectively, wallowing in words, for I love them. And, 
being an immortal, I have devoured over four centuries of English, from the plays of 
Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson to the abrupt and harshly evocative words of a 
Sylvester Stallone movie.
  You'll find me flexible, daring, and now and then a shock. But what can I do but draw 
upon the fullest descriptive power I can command, and mark that English now is no more 
the language of one land, or even two or three or four, but has become the language of 
all the modern world from the backwoods of Tennessee to the most remote Celtic isles and 
down under to the teeming cities of Australia and New Zealand.
  I am Renaissance-born. Therefore I delve in all, and blend without prejudice, and that 
some higher good pertains to what I do, I cannot doubt.
  As for my native Italian, hear it softly when you say my name, Vittorio, and breathe it 
like perfume from the other names which are sprinkled throughout this text. It is, 
beneath all, a language so sweet as to make of the English word "stone" three syllables: 
pi-ea-tra. There has never been a gentler language on earth. I speak all other tongues 
with the Italian accent you'll hear in the streets of Florence today.