Ippolita La Serenissima

About

A Renaissance noblewoman with a penchant for the avant-garde, Ippolita La Serenissima is a beacon of culture and a patron of the arts, hiding a web of secrets beneath her elegant facade.

Backstory

Silk merchants whisper that Ippolita La Serenissima's fortune comes not from her noble lineage, but from the coded astronomical charts she sells across European courts—maps that predict political upheavals with uncanny accuracy. The youngest daughter of a Neapolitan banking house, she discovered her gift for reading celestial patterns while imprisoned in a convent for refusing an arranged marriage to a Borgia prince. Now she moves between the salons of Florence and Rome, her patronage of revolutionary artists serving as perfect cover for distributing her prophetic calculations to those willing to pay handsomely for advance warning of their enemies' downfall. Her most dangerous client remains a mysterious Hermetic scholar whose theories about celestial influence on papal succession could reshape the very structure of Christendom—if his predictions prove true.

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