Torniamo

Trieste, 1768.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann-the celebrated scholar who taught Europe how to see the ancient world-lies dying after a brutal attack by a stranger. Only days earlier, he had been honored by Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. Now, in a rented room far from Rome, his final journey has ended in violence.

As memory overtakes pain, Winckelmann returns to the places and people that shaped him.

Born the son of a poor shoemaker in the Prussian town of Stendal, he grows up surrounded by hardship but possessed by an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Ancient Greece becomes his imagined homeland: a realm of beauty, freedom, and perfection far removed from the narrow circumstances of his birth.

His search carries him through schools, universities, libraries, and aristocratic households. In Dresden, the great collections of antiquities awaken his vocation. In Rome, amid cardinals, artists, excavators, and the newly uncovered treasures of Pompeii and Herculaneum, he transforms his devotion to classical beauty into a revolutionary understanding of art. His writings establish him as the father of modern art history and archaeology.

Yet recognition cannot silence the longings beneath his achievement-the desire for friendship, belonging, freedom, and a home among the ancient marbles he loves.

Why, at the height of his fame, did Winckelmann abandon his journey north and turn back toward Rome? And what drew him into the company of the man who would kill him?

Richly researched and vividly imagined, Torniamo brings to life one of the eighteenth century's most influential and enigmatic figures. Moving from a shoemaker's workshop in Stendal to the collections of Dresden, the palaces of Rome, and a fatal room in Trieste, it is a sweeping historical novel about beauty, ambition, identity, and the restless search for home.

Torniamo-let us return.