ATANOR EDICIONES 2011

Baroque Madrid celebrates the funeral of Lope de Vega with grand festivities. With the passing of the “Phoenix of Wits,” Spain bids farewell to the most beloved writer of its Golden Age, while his tomb becomes a site of pilgrimage to honor a legend.

One of his disciples decides to pay tribute by compiling a literary anthology featuring all the poets who admired him. But when the book is published, three unfamiliar poetesses appear among the contributors: the Portuguese Lady Elisa, the French Madame Argenis, and the Italian Madonna Fenice. The people of Madrid—who knew every detail of the playwright’s gallant affairs—begin to gossip about the identities of these mysterious ladies.

Thus, the story takes us back to Lope’s youthful, Don Juan–like days, when he first began to earn fame as a playwright and an incorrigible womanizer, a soldier of fortune in the expeditions to the Azores and the Spanish Armada, and the abductor of Doña Isabel de Urbina, whom he carried off by force.

But one day, this heartbreaker encounters a Florentine woman passing through Spain, whose face reminds him of a Madonna, and for the first—and only—time in his life, he falls truly and eternally in love. The lady’s husband is entangled in the trade of dyes with the complicity of certain members of the Spanish court. The mutual love between Lope and the woman who will become Madonna Fenice endures, intermittently, in defiance of both time and distance.