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As part of the series Meet the Author, the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco presents Macello Simonetta and his mystery novel "The Montefeltro Conspiracy" (Doubleday, 2008).

A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age.

More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence.

In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot in detail.

Added by jessiic on February 11, 2009

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