Today I am pleased to welcome author Hannah Fielding to the blog as part of her blog tour for The Echoes of Love. As well as her guest post below, there is a great giveaway too!
The Echoes of Love ‘Legendary’ Blog Tour: The true
sword in the stone
For the love of
legends by Hannah Fielding
For me,
researching a book is just as enjoyable as writing it. I set each of my novels
in a passionate, romantic country,
and so that I can really transport my readers there, I immerse myself in the
setting: its history, its scenery, its cuisine, its culture. Top of my research
list are local legends – I love colourful, age-old stories; the more
fantastical, the better!
Since I was a
young girl, tucked up in bed and listening avidly to my governess weaving
bedtime tales, I have loved legends. Fairytales too, of course – they sowed the
seeds for my romantic nature – but legends fascinated me most: those that have
stood the test of time, that offer intriguing explanations for the modern
world, that are at once fantastical and yet, somehow, believable.
My novel The Echoes of Love, set in Venice, Tuscany and Sardinia, incorporates
various Italian legends – told by the hero, Paolo, who is a raconteur
extraordinaire, to my heroine, Venetia – and in my research files I collected
many more. What better way to share some of these most romantic, magical and atmospheric
tales but in this Echoes of Love
‘Legendary’ Blog Tour!
Today, I’m
taking you to Tuscany, home to Paolo in The
Echoes of Love, and a place I
very much enjoyed describing in the novel, so beautiful is the scenery:
The shimmering hillside, planted with olives and
vines, sloped steeply down; beyond the motionless spires of cypresses stretched
the blue and green hills of Tuscany. The hollows and little valleys were
brimming up with whitish haze and the flat elder blossoms spread unmoving in
the heat of this glorious day.
On the seaward side, they overlooked a necklace of
small, sun-drenched, white sand beaches, separated by coves and craggy coral
rock outcroppings. Viewed from far above, the shoreline was spectacular, with
the great Tyrrhenian Sea stretching out beyond, sprinkled with islets and
dotted with boats on its turquoise surface. The Ferrari tore past clusters of
pastel-hued cottages framed by flowering trees, nestling in the hills that rose
to windswept bluffs, where every turning had a picture-postcard view of
sprawling green land, coloured villas and blue waters.
The true sword
in the stone
Visit the Chapel
of Montesiepi, adjacent to the San Galgano Abbey in the Val di Merse
countryside, and you’ll hear this legend:
In the 12th
century there lived a knight named Galgano. He was a fearless warrior and
fought bravely in countless battles. But he reached a point where the violence
in which he was so often embroiled disgusted his stirring spiritual
sensibilities, and when he saw a vision of the Archangel Michael, he was
forever a changed man. And so, in pursuit of redemption for the pain and death
he had wrought, he retreated to live the life of a hermit. Atop the Montesiepi
hill, he had an epiphany and decided to dedicate his life to God. To do so, he
knew he must renounce his former sins – and in symbolism of his rejection of
violence, he took up his sword and plunged it down, down, down… until the sword
stuck firm, with just the hilt and a little of the blade protruding, to form a
cross. And the base for this self-created alter? A rock!
Eventually,
Galgano would be recognised as a saint, and a formal chapel built around this
miracle he had made. To this day, people come from far and wide to see the
sword in the stone.
For a long time,
it was assumed that the legend was nothing more than a fable – albeit a
powerful one that was either inspired by or itself inspired the English legend
of King Arthur and Excalibur. And yet, in 2001, when academics examined the sword,
they discovered it is not, in fact, a fake; the metal of the sword dates it
much earlier than modern times, and the style of the sword is suggestive of one
made in the 12th century…
Follow the tour
If you’d like to
read more Italian legends like this, and keep up with the accompanying Very
Venetian giveaway in which lots of romantic goodies are up for grabs, follow
the Echoes of Love ‘Legendary’ Blog
Tour this month:
WIN in the Very
Venetian giveaway
At least one
reader commenting on this post will WIN
in the Very Venetian giveaway, with prizes totalling more than $600:
·
5 signed hardback copies of The Echoes of Love
·
10 signed paperback copies of The Echoes of Love
·
3 romantic Venetian masks
· Lots of fabulously colourful
Murano glass goodies: 16 pendants, 2 bracelets, 2 paperweights and a vase.
Anyone who comments on a blog tour stop post will be entered in the
giveaway. Simply comment below, including your email address so that Hannah can
contact the winners. Good luck!
About the author
Hannah Fielding is a novelist, a
dreamer, a traveller, a mother, a wife and an incurable romantic. The seeds for
her writing career were sown in early childhood, spent in Egypt, when she came
to an agreement with her governess Zula: for each fairy story Zula told, Hannah
would invent and relate one of her own. Years later – following a degree in
French literature, several years of travelling in Europe, falling in love with
an Englishman, the arrival of two beautiful children and a career in property
development – Hannah decided after so many years of yearning to write that the
time was now. Today, she lives the dream: she writes full time, splitting her
time between her homes in Kent, England, and the South of France, where she dreams
up romances overlooking breathtaking views of the Mediterranean.
Her first novel, Burning Embers, is a vivid, evocative
love story set against the backdrop of tempestuous and wild Kenya of the 1970s,
reviewed by one newspaper as ‘romance like Hollywood used to make’. Her new
novel, The Echoes of Love, is a story
of passion, betrayal and intrigue set in the romantic and mysterious city of
Venice and the beautiful landscape of Tuscany. It was picked by The Sun newspaper as one of the most
romantic books ever written.
Social media links
Book links
About the novel
Seduction, passion and the chance for new love.
A terrible truth that will change two lives forever.
Venetia Aston-Montagu has escaped
to Italy’s most captivating city to work in her godmother’s architectural
practice, putting a lost love behind her. For the past ten years she has built
a fortress around her heart, only to find the walls tumbling down one night of
the carnival when she is rescued from masked assailants by an enigmatic
stranger, Paolo Barone.
Drawn to the powerfully seductive
Paolo, despite warnings of his Don Juan reputation and rumours that he keeps a
mistress, Venetia can’t help being caught up in the smouldering passion that
ignites between them.
When she finds herself assigned
to a project at his magnificent home deep in the Tuscan countryside, Venetia
must not only contend with a beautiful young rival, but also come face to face
with the dark shadows of Paolo’s past that threaten to come between them.
Can Venetia trust that love will
triumph, even over her own demons? Or will Paolo’s carefully guarded,
devastating secret tear them apart forever?
