All about my mother

She was a Circassian, and she was a slave.

Carlo Vecce is the author of a fictionalized biography of Caterina, mother of Leonardo da Vinci, published by Giunti Editore. A fascinating and captivating story that comes about following the discovery of important unpublished documents. These texts shed light and close the chapter on the mystery of Leonardo’s origins, within a multi layered and complex debate. 

A swamp at the mouth of the Don River, on the Sea of Azov. One morning in July. A girl is dragged away from her homeland, enslaved, sold and resold as an object by human traffickers. When she arrives in Italy, she is on the lowest rung of the social and human ladder, without voice or dignity. They stole everything from her - her body, her dreams, her future - but she will prove stronger than them: she will suffer, fight, love, give her life and regain her freedom. 

It seems like a modern tale, not a story of a distant and fabulous past. This is what shocked Carlo Vecce, a well-known and esteemed researcher and scholar of Leonardo's life and work. One day, a new document forced him to go back on the trail of Leonardo's mother Caterina, and to look at things in a completely different way. Gradually, from other documents and manuscripts, there emerged signs of forgotten existences, of lives interwoven by the forces of chance or destiny. Real people, not fictional characters. Adventurers, prostitutes, pirates, slaves, knights, gentlewomen, peasants, soldiers, notaries. Their stories go back from Vinci to Florence, from Venice to Constantinople, from the Black Sea to the wild highlands of the Caucasus.

Leonardo is known to be the natural son of a young notary from Florence, Piero, and a woman called Caterina. Almost nothing was known about her, except that she was married to a farmer called di Vinci shortly after Leonardo's birth. The only certain thing is that, in the formation of her son's extraordinary inner world, of his inexhaustible search for knowledge and freedom, his mother must most certainly have been a decisive figure. She is the true mystery of his life.  

For some years, the hypothesis circulated that Caterina was a slave: until now, this idea was poorly documented, though not far-fetched. The modern slavery that reached the Americas was born in the Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages. A little known, embarrassing, wantonly forgotten story, because it was also perpetrated by us Italians. Big business for merchants from Venice and Genoa: male and female slaves, known as 'heads' in the documents, were more profitable than spices and precious metals. In Florence, the demand was especially high for young women, destined to serve as maids, carers, and even concubines, sexual slaves, who, in the event of pregnancy, continued to be useful even after giving birth by nursing the infants of their masters.