Apology for a Murder (Hesperus Classics) - Softcover

'It is a beautifully written - and translated - piece of writing, but interesting chiefly insofar as it was written at all' --The Independent Online

'A wonderful Renaissance curiosity. It's a little gem of moralising spin, in defence of pre-emptive violence' --The Independent

What do you do if you come into the world bearing the same name as various ancestors, of whom some were considered good and others even great? Born in 1514, christened Lorenzo de’ Medici, a young boy discovers that not only was his grandfather called Lorenzo, but likewise his great great grandfather, a man who is still revered as the good and generous brother to the even more revered Cosimo the Elder who set up the Medici dynasty. Worst of all, there is the oppressive memory of Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose posthumous fame is still growing despite the fact that he actually embezzled much of the wealth of your side of the family.
Well, one thing you can do is to call yourself something else. In general, Italian has two ways of altering a word or name. There is the affectionate diminutive produced by the suffix -ino, and the insulting pejorative created by the suffix -accio. Hence we have ragazzo, a boy, ragazzino, a nice little boy, and ragazzaccio, a young hooligan. Curiously, Lorenzo came to be known both as Lorenzino, perhaps because he was short, perhaps because it was understood that he was bound to be less important than his ancestor namesakes, and Lorenzaccio, nasty Lorenzo. Quite probably he got this second name because of the way he reacted to the implications of the first.