Venetian Born

‘Venetian Born’ is a story about friendship—an unlikely friendship between two very different boys with very similar names; Piero Caesar Alberti, raised on a Lido farm before being moved to a backwater port town to work at an inn, and Giulio Caesar Alberti, born into the second highest class of Venezia and in training at the Ducal Palace to be a Secretary-Ambassador if not Secretary to the Ten like his father. These were real characters, in the flesh, ones who did exist in that exact time, and lived, studied, or worked in those exact places the author, Andy Burtis, describes: He knows, for he has stayed in the same inn at Malamocco that Piero worked in before sailing off to Holland and America in his second and third books of the trilogy of these characters’ Bildungsroman. His researchers, one a Ph.D in Venetian History from Princeton, the other from Padova who specializes in the Alberti families of Venice, have brought life from the archives like