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|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Historical Fiction
|summary=A cracking story which seamlessly joins history and fiction to make something special. Suspend your annoyance about the lack of adequate proofreading - it's worth the effort. Daniel Peltz popped into Bookbag Towers to [[The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Daniel Peltz|chat to us]].
|rating=4
|buy=Yes
}}
When we first visit the Chiesa di Santa Maria we're in the company of Molly Cavendish who is a part-time guide at the Museo di Santa Maria, which is what the ruins of the Chiesa - a chapel - have now become. Crowds flock to see its centrepiececentre piece, a renaissance fresco with a history which grabs the attention of young and old. Molly uses the history to entertain the tourists, but there's more too it than she knows, particularly as the history of the building is also the history of the Vannini family, who helped in building the chapel some six hundred years ago and one of whose descendants is the director of the museum.
I was a little bit nervous about reading ''The Indomitable Chiesa di Santa Maria'': a ''novel'' about a ''building''? How was that going to work? But, the Chiesa di Santa Maria is on the banks of the Arno in Florence and Florence has always been one of my favourite cities, so, in need of some Tuscan sunshine, I gave it a go. I'm glad I did, because it's a cracker of a story, but I have some gripes and I'll get them out of the way first.
If you'd like to know more about Florence when the Chiesa di Santa Maria was being built we can recommend [[The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de' Medici by Catherine Fletcher]]. If you're going to Italy and want to see the art as opposed to the tourist attractions then you might find [[101 Places in Italy : A Private Grand Tour by Francis Russell]] useful, but you'll get a more comfortable trip round Florence from reading ''The Indomitable Chiesa di Santa Maria''.
 
{{interviewtext|author=Daniel Peltz}}
 
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