Sarah Dunant on The Marchesa

An author evening at a library in Hampstead where Sarah Dunant talks about her novels set in the Italian Renaissance, in the light of her latest book The Marchesa. The event is hosted by Keats Community Library. The Marchesa follows Isabella d'Este, born in 1474, the leading female art collector and patron of her time, who ran a famed court, was a fashion icon and a cunning political operator. The book mixes historical fiction with biography, scholarship and art, told through her preserved correspondence and asking how far we can set aside our own values when understanding people of the past.