Leonardo da Vinci in a ‘chamber’ mystery

Milan, 3 February 1498. Snow buries the streets of Ludovico il Moro’s duchy, the frost grips the city like a vice, and in a hall of the castle a crime is committed that will compel the most multifaceted mind of the Renaissance to lay down his brush and take up the fateful magnifying glass.

Carlo Catturini draws on a chronological span of just one week to craft *Leonardo. The Mystery of the Treasure Chamber* (Meravigli, 2026), his debut novel. But behind the fiction lies genuine expertise; this is lent credibility by the pedigree of the archivist turned writer – the very same background that made Marcello Simoni’s fortune, an archaeologist and librarian before becoming a successful novelist, and which fuels the documentary obsession of Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti. Catturini spent years handling genuine documents before venturing into inventing fake ones; he is already the author of specialist studies on the Sala delle Asse in the Falconiere tower.

Whilst Simoni favours spatial expansion, with Gothic settings, mist-shrouded cemeteries, dense forests and blocks of flats capable of evoking a sense of remoteness, Catturini opts for compression: seven days, a drawing room in a setting frozen by the cold. Not the sweeping scope of an atmospheric novel, but the almost theatrical unity of a ‘chamber’ crime story. It is a gamble that forgoes the comfort of a plot unfolding over months; for a debut author, this signals something more than a mere stylistic whim, implicitly declaring that he has delved deeply into the architecture of the genre even before setting pen to paper.