All Roads Lead to Rome

The conversation at Fangs, Fur, and Fey this week is all about how we chose the setting for our books. Makes sense. It’s a site about urban fantasy, so the urban part should form a rather large component of the final result.

My book, RAMPANT, is set in Rome, and, as others have said about their own books, Rome is almost another character in my novel.

But in writing this post, I began to realize that, at this point in the creation, I’m having a hard time remembering which part of the story necessitated its setting, and which part grew out of the fact that I’d chosen the setting I did. I do remember considering a different setting for a short time, early in the process. Due to the mythology of the story (maneating unicorns that can only be killed by virgin descendants of Alexander the Great, and the millenia-old culture that grew up around this fact), there were only a few potential places I could pull this off.

Rome had an advantage, both because I was more familiar with its history, culture and landmarks than the other potential location, and because the mythology of the order required a certain culture of accepted, institutionalized chastity. The ancients had the Vestal Virgins, who lent my unicorn hunters both costumes and some really gory punishments, and the Christians have scores upon scores of religious orders, which gave my unicorn hunters a cultural touchstone, architectural style, and organizational structure. I made Rome the seat of the hunter’s order, likening them to the Knights Templar or other similar groups.

Rome is also filled with parks, ruins, catacombs, and other places for giant, maneating unicorns to hide in between their terrorizing rampages. Rome’s bloody history, filled with gladiators, martyrs, artists, and saints, imparted a long sense of both history and painful trials to my fledgling order of hunters.

But the story has grown so much since I committed to setting in Rome that with many elements, I don’t know which came first. For instance, Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn has long been one of my inspirations. But with a Rome-set story, my characters could actually see this painting, which is on display at the Borghese Gallery.

And there are things I discovered in my January trip to Rome that either dovetailed exactly with concepts I had already written or have been incorporated into the story such that I can’t imagine the novel without them. For instance, the ancient Cloisters in the Basilica di SS. Giovanni in Laterano, with its beautiful, unicorn horn-shaped columns and other architectural elements was dramatic, gorgeous, and thematically perfect. My husband can attest to the hundreds of pictures I’d taken of cloisters during out trip. When I found these, I know my search was over.

Oh yeah. Eat your heart out, Dan Brown.