Prince of the Clouds: a novel. By Gianni Riotta. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. 287 pages. $24.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Can you imagine becoming enthralled with a novel in which the hero’s a shy, courtly pedant who’s spent his entire life analyzing the strategies of famous battles in order to find guidance for the proper conduct of life? Trust me, Colonel Carlo Terzo, the gentle, extraordinarily knowledgeable hero of Prince of the Clouds, will capture your heart and mind, just as he wins the love of the dashing aristocratic spy Princess Emma Svyatoslava.

The bulk of the story takes place in Sicily in 1946. Terzo and his wife have fled the collapsing Fascist regime to a small house in Palermo where Emma hopes to hide from her troublesome past as a spy for Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Ciano. Emma selected Terzo to marry because once, in 1942, while they both waited to see Ciano, Terzo explained Napoleon’s battle of Marango to her so dramatically that he ended up singing passages from the opera Tosca, in which the outcome of Marango means life or death for Tosca’s lover.

It has occurred to Terzo that seducing a woman is not unlike planning a battle: “ensuring supply lines, keeping the length of the front line short enough to avoid exposing oneself, covering one’s flank with natural obstacles or cavalry, concentrating the offensive on a limited front and, more important, acting boldly.” Unfortunately he has never “succeeded in making these insights concrete . . .; he had always remained alone.” So everything about his marriage with Emma, “including the very idea of marrying, had been decided by Princess Emma. It had never occurred to the colonel to say no. Palermo seemed to him the perfect place for disappearing after a useless life.”

Terzo believes himself to be a miserable failure. He has always wanted to face battle in person, to experience first hand what he knows inside out theoretically. He and his dearest friend, the dashing Lieutenant Amedeo Campari, argued incessantly over the question of whether war is method, as Terzo holds, or madness, as Campari asserts. In 1940 Campari manages to get posted to the Italian forces headed for Russia, but Terzo is assigned to more library research and ends the war with even greater stacks of notebooks detailing ancient, medieval, and modern battles. Terzo cannot stop himself from imagining strategies. Looking out over the harbor at Palermo, he thinks: “If the sea were a magic battlefield . . . two armies would now rise up, one facing the horizon, the other the city. The current flowing from Capo Gallo would be a river and General Horizon would use it to support his right flank. General City would choose the Island of Women as his stronghold to allow reserves to flow along the brackish current there below.”

In fact, Emma has perceived something far deeper and more humane in Terzo than his quaintly entertaining knowledge and his usefulness as a pawn. As she slowly succumbs to lung cancer (“too many of those thin Greek cigarettes”), her beauty fades. “In sunlight, [Terzo] thought, she looks tired and sick, but the shadows preserve her charms. And he sought to look at her only in shadow.” As Emma has intuited from the start, she has married a man of extraordinary kindness and sensitivity.

Emma arranges for Terzo to tutor 16-year-old Salvatore Dragonara. The lessons, however, seem to Terzo to be merely a cover for the Romeo-Juliet romance between poor, Communist Salvatore, a pacifist poet at heart, and his beloved Fiore Mastema, whose widowed mother, the Duchess Luminosa Mastema, is a hated and feared landlord with vast rural holdings.

Their sunshot romantic fable darkens as the peasants rise up to expropriate the land and come under attack by both the Italian army and bandit-mafiosi thugs hired by the Duchess Mastema. To his utter surprise Terzo finds himself called upon to devise real battle plans against apparently insurmountable odds. Will the lessons of Sun Tzu and Hannibal and Montecuccoli and Napoleon serve now, in this time of need? Have Terzo’s pupils been listening to him, despite their amorous dalliance?

Prince of the Clouds is a fascinating meditation on war and love, on how to live and how to die, but it’s also a grand story filled with engaging characters. I have to say, Terzo’s historical battle descriptions are terrific. But then the author is simply a marvelous writer. Witness the scene as Colonel Terzo has caffe latte on his terrace in the morning: “The sheets hanging from the clotheslines between the railings billowed against the blue sky, buffeted by the shore breeze and snapping like sails in the wind. Signora Astraco, an early riser, leaned out the window and with some effort pushed the line forward with a bamboo reed. Ever so slowly, she moved the sheets away, raising the curtain on the city below.”

It is probably hubris on the author’s part to have the Prince of Lampedusa, who wrote that masterpiece The Leopard, say to Terzo: “What an amazing story. Excuse me for taking the liberty of listening in. I, too, am a military history buff. And you are someone I would like to know.” But frankly, Lampedusa and his spectacular evocations of Sicily do come to mind when reading this beautifully translated novel, as does Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. The flyleaf of Prince of the Clouds, a bestseller in Europe, compares it to Louis de Bernieres’s popular novel Corelli’s Mandolin. Myself, I think Gianni Riotta is leagues ahead in wit, depth, meaning, and delight.