Here is the building whose memory launched my second historical novel, Swimming in the Moon. It’s the Palazzo Donn’Anna in Naples. My Italian teacher grew up in the second floor apartment, with a grand dining room window rimmed by a gilded frame looking on the Bay of Naples. Capri floated in the blue distance.
Many in the sciences have noted that scientific discovery is more often proceeded by “Hum, that’s funny” than by “Eureka!” I wonder if it’s often the same with narrative fiction. Some years later, when I was living in Tennessee, I wondered what it would be like to live in the Palazzo Donn’Anna a hundred years ago as a servant, so you were the one cleaning salt from that grand window and dusting the gilt. A mother, gifted in music, afflicted with mental instability. A daughter who loves her but wants more, like an education, but this life of servitude in splendor is all that they know. Until they are forced to leave it. What would that be like? Hum, that’s funny.
pamelaschoenewaldt.com 