I would like your browsing reader to begin with the Prologue. There they will look back from the scaffold on which the fallen prophet and his two lieutenants met their deaths and move on to a brief discussion of prophets in history before embarking with Savonarola on his journey toward the Apocalypse.I would like readers of this book to experience the excitement of an extraordinary life involved in some of the critical events of European history.

I also hope readers take away from it a more nuanced picture of the Italian Renaissance, especially as it was lived in its most representative city, Florence, in the late fifteenth century. And I also hope that the book will attract them to some of the many other studies of Savonarola’s world and its inhabitants, including such fascinating figures as Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico della Mirandola, Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and Niccolò Machiavelli. A surprising number of these studies is in English.