Tuscany, 1897. The young tenor Enrico Caruso arrives at the Giachetti family residence to sing on the summer stage with Ada Giachetti, a beautiful young soprano and the older of two sisters.

While the married Ada has little patience for the inexperienced young man she dismisses as “el tenorino,” her younger sister, Rina, barely seventeen, falls completely in love from the moment she first hears him speak and the bundle of artichokes she's brought home from the market drops to the floor. As Caruso's career advances, Ada's feelings for him deepen, and he is forced to choose between two sisters.

New York, 1903. His relations with both sisters spin out of control, and, amid scandal, Caruso pursues fame and fortune across the Atlantic. There he meets the shy, lonely Dorothy Benjamin Park. Even as Rina awaits his return home to Italy, Caruso once again falls in love.

Though his voice enthralled the world over a century ago, Enrico Caruso remains perhaps the most celebrated tenor who ever lived. In this remarkable, intensely imagined novel, renowned poet Mary di Michele discovers a man as passionate for life as for his music, a man who adored and was adored in turn.

Vividly realized and impeccably researched, brimming with lyricism and sensuality, Tenor of Love explores the tensions between life and art, love and ambition. At its heart, it is a novel about love: who we love, how, and why.

LITTLE SISTER

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si torva una rubrica
la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be deciphered, there is a rubric that reads: Here the new life begins.

—dante, la vita nuova

1

Every summer my family would escape the heat and the crowds of Firenze and move to Livorno where we had an apartment on the uppermost floor of a building on Viale Regina Margarita. Poplars shaded our home there, singing sotto voce in the marine breezes. The scent of pinewood, tamarisk, and lime trees blended with the salt in the air.

It was early in July, nearly noon, when a young man presented himself at the door. In 1897 I was barely seventeen; I was sixteen and counting the days. The poplars shone so brightly that morning they were themselves green suns. Their leaves shivered in the heat and wind, the light in them rippled. The foliage seemed to move in waves so the street became a high sea, a sea not blue like the Ligurian, but verdant.

Only Mamma was home when he knocked. He came with a letter of introduction from Leopoldo Mugnone, the Sicilian conductor and composer who had helped launch my sister Ada’s singing career. When the young Enrico Caruso asked Mamma if she could recommend a pensione for him to stay, she felt sorry for him and offered our spare room to this stranger carrying his things in a cardboard suitcase.

That morning Ada was rehearsing at the Goldini, while I was shopping at the farmers’ market. Mamma had a craving for artichokes and I had gone to fetch some. I filled a sack with those thorny green roses. The prickles are on the head, surrounding the heart, and the choke is at the center. Roses don’t threaten their own beauty; they keep their thorns on the stem. The artichoke is not a mistress, but a wife swathed in a chastity belt. Mother had been planning to stuff and stew the artichokes for dinner, but the tenor’s unexpected arrival changed all that.

It must have been stepping out of the brightness of the afternoon and into the cool dimness of the house that made everything seem so dark, so altered. I smelled him before I saw him. His scent was a murky music composed of musk and wood, and yes, also some kitchen smells. It was more than the slick air of his brilliantine and the must of stale clothes that I sensed. It was the odor of cooking oil and of Sicilian olives spiced with garlic and chilies. It was a smell of eating in bed, not the invalid’s, but the lover’s.

The bag of artichokes dropped out of my hands. The loose heads rolled freely, bloodlessly, as if from the clean execution of the guillotine. I scrambled after them, gathering them up in my skirt.

“Signorina.” At the sound of his voice I looked up and it was then I saw him for the first time, the view of his face from below. I was on my knees. He was smiling, and although he had already begun to laugh, from the angle that I saw him his face seemed grave and his eyes were obscured by deep shadows.

“Signorina,” he repeated, and when he spoke the syllables resonated as if I were being called to worship by a golden bell. I say worship, but the voice had body, not just spirit. Maybe I had tasted something like it; maybe it was like cream, cream when it is whipped, the volume filled with sweetness. I felt a weakness in my stomach and in my knees. I felt a fluttering in my knickers as if a moth, asleep for sixteen years, had suddenly burst through its cocoon and was beating its wings against my bottom.

“Mamma” was the only word that escaped my lips. It was the voice of a doll you have to shake to make her talk.

I went running into the kitchen, the artichokes bunched up in my skirt, not aware that I was exposing myself. He followed closely. I turned and saw his grin and that his eyes were fixed on the lace of my bloomers. I dropped the artichokes again and that was the end of having them for dinner.

"Mary di Michele brings her poet's eye to this rich, suggestive, and intensely original novel. The tension between life and art is beautifully rendered, and the descriptions, especially those of Italy in its different seasons, are breathtaking in their intensity."
—Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief

"A wonderfully absorbing novel, imaginatively told...lush, sensuous, and lyrical."
—Sandra Gulland, author of The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.

"Mary di Michele has a passionate voice. It is powerful, palpable, and warm. Tenor of Love proves that memory is made of mercury, grief is canine, and unrequited love is still the greatest aria of all. This is one of those few stories that I was waiting for without having realized it."
—Peter Oliva, author of The City of Yes and Drowning in Darkness

"After finishing this book I found myself humming, then singing aloud, the one scrap of opera I know. In language as earthy and ethereal as that music, Tenor of Love divines the living face behind the mask of fame. But its ultimate gift to the reader, the listener, is joy."
—Roo Borson, author of Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, Water Memory, and Nightwalk