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L'ultimo Catone

By Matilde Asensi, Andrea Carlo Cappi (Translator)

(1572)

| Hardcover | 9788848603270

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Book Description

Ladri di reliquie, le Chiese cristiane d’Oriente e d’Occidente, un’oscura confraternita religiosa e La Divina Commedia sono gli elementi chiave di questo intrigo mozzafiato lungo diciassette secoli.

A raccontare tutto con voce rotta dall’emozione è Suor Ottavia Salina, in fatto di paleografia Continue

A raccontare tutto con voce rotta dall’emozione è Suor Ottavia Salina, in fatto di paleografia massima autorità dell’Archivio Segreto del Vaticano. Un giorno, mentre è china su una ruvida pergamena, viene convocata urgentemente dalle più alte gerarchie pontificie che le affidano un compito di estrema segretezza. Suor Ottavia è l’unica persona al mondo in grado di decifrare uno strano tatuaggio – sette croci e sette lettere in greco antico che formano la parola stauros, ovvero croce – inciso sul cadavere di un etiope ritrovato sui monti della Grecia. Da questo enigma sembrano dipendere le sorti di tutte le Chiese cristiane, tanto più che accanto al corpo sono stati rinvenuti tre pezzetti di legno che probabilmente sono schegge della croce di Cristo.
Affiancata dall’inflessibile Guardia Svizzera Kaspar Glauser-Röist e dall’archeologo Farag Boswell, la suorina paleografa finisce per indagare su una setta tanto misteriosa quanto dimenticata: gli Staurophiyakes, ovvero i Guardiani della Vera Croce, incaricati nel IV secolo di vegliare sul Sacro Legno e ora fermamente intenzionati a trafugarne tutti i frammenti dalle principali chiese del mondo. Ma come scovare i fantomatici ladri, le cui tracce sembrano scomparire in un remoto passato?
La soluzione –sveleranno i tre investigatori- è celata in un unico vastissimo codice, il capolavoro assoluto del membro più illustre della Confraternita: Dante. Può dunque suonare come un indizio concreto la terzina del Purgatorio: “Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero/ché ‘l velo è ora ben tanto sottile,/certo che ‘l trapassar dentro è leggero”? Quali canti nascondono riferimenti ai rituali e ai luoghi di ritrovo reali degli Staurophiyakes?
Cercando significati reconditi in ogni singolo verso del Purgatorio, sottoponendosi a pericolose prove iniziatiche e passando attraverso le sette città simbolo dei peccati capitali – Roma, Ravenna, Gerusalemme, Atene, Costantinopoli, Alessandria e Antiochia -, Suor Ottavia e i suoi due compagni metteranno a repentaglio le loro vite per sciogliere il mistero finale: chi è l’ultimo Catone?

Critics

L'ultimo catone

La trama e le recensioni di L'ultimo catone, romanzo di Matilde Asensi edito da Sonzogno. A raccontare tutto con voce rotta dall'emozione è Suor Ottavia Salina, in fatto di paleografia massima autorità dell'Archivio Segreto del Vaticano. Un giorno, m ... (read full critics)

Qlibri published on Thu, 25 Nov 2010

3 Reviews

L' ultimo Catone by Matilde Asensi (2006)

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Reinhard said on Oct 4, 2010 | Add your feedback

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Lele71vr said on Sep 29, 2010 about the Softcover edition | Add your feedback

*** This comment contains spoilers! ***

First of all you have to keep this in your mind: this isn't a clone of Brown's Da Vince Code.
Not AT ALL.
There's even quite an evidence for you: it was published 2 whole years before Dan Brown became such a famous nuisance all around the world. But, still, this book falls in step with the ... (continue)

First of all you have to keep this in your mind: this isn't a clone of Brown's Da Vince Code.
Not AT ALL.
There's even quite an evidence for you: it was published 2 whole years before Dan Brown became such a famous nuisance all around the world. But, still, this book falls in step with the genre that Brown made so famous, so this is what you have to expect when you start reading.
Secondly, this is a novel. Ms Asensi never said otherwise all along all the books. So, don't expect to find any true truth here... being a fictional story, the author took all the liberties she needed to make her story better.
Unfortunately, as any good book with a good writer behind, this isn't an easy story and it's required that the reader has at least a light knowledge of the historical background the author refers to. Otherwise, you'll find difficult to understand and quite boring in some passages.
The main characters is a nun, Dr. Ottavia Salina. And she's not a common nun, she's paleographer, with a doctorate both in paleography and art history... and she is the Director of the Vatican's Classified Archives.
So, it's not strange that some day she was asked to examine some tattoos -or, better, some scarifications- found on a men dead in a plane crash, whom was involved in the smuggle of priceless artifacts.
What instead was strange was that Dr Salina had to work with Captain Kaspar Glauser-Roist, a member of the Swiss Guard (with some sinister affiliations I won't spoiler you) , and with Professor Farag Boswell, an atheist archaeologist with a Coptic Christian background.
Of course, during the investigations, they started to be involved with a secret society (well, this is quite a cliché nowadays), whose secrets are hiddend between the lines of Dante Alighieri's Commedia - see why I absolutely love this book?. Obviously, this society and its leader, called 'Cato*' (from here, the title of the book), did whatever they could to stop our characters during their personal quest, going near to kill them multiple times.
What annoys me a bit was how Ms Asensi look for some romance to put in a story that shouldn't have any; I'm not disturbed by it as per se, but because it seemed a bit calculated to be believable, like she hadto put it so more people would like her book.
But, you know, in a story about religion and its mysteries, romance (and especially this kind of romance) is a bit out of place... but, since this wasn't the most important theme of the book, you can always pretend it doesn't exist, especially because you figure it out from the very first page and so you can simply ignore it.
Another bad spot is her character's characterization: she goes too easily with some stereotypes and focus too much on historical/architectural/philosophical/whatever detail instead of her characters, so tehy suffered a bit with the lack of attention. Not they aren't well portrayed, but I still think she could have done a far better job, especially because she created something quite itneresting that would have given her a lot of narrative possibilities.
Besides that, I LOVED how much architecture was described here. The characters move up and down Italy and through Europe and Ms Asens describe every place so well that you can almost picture it in front of you (and I'm pretty sure she did a good job, because I was in some of those places and they actually are as she said!). I hope the shades of her descriptions didn't get lost in the English translation, because it would be really said (luckily, she's Spanish, so the Italian translator couldn't possibly ruin it)..
So, what makes this book quite good are the descriptions and the settings. Ms Asens is an European, a Spanish woman, and you can see it: she describes something true, she hints at power balances and contrast that only someone that lives here can understand. Something that people like Mr Brown won't ever be able to do, not only because he lacks of the right premises to be a good writer (research before writing idiocies!), but because he lives in a country completely different from ours.
And I'm definitely going to buy and read even 'Iacobus' and 'The lost origin', so expect to hear about her very soon!

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Esus said on Feb 2, 2008 | Add your feedback