The Sign of the Weeping Virgin

In the summer of 1480, Florentine lawyer Guid’Antonio Vespucci and his nephew, Amerigo, return home to Italy from a wartime mission only to find their dreams of peace shattered. A young girl has been kidnapped, and a centuries-old painting of the Virgin Mary is weeping in Guid'Antonio and Amerigo's family church. Fearful Florentines interpret these disturbing events as signs of God's wrath for their support of the city's leader, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Lorenzo's refusal to end his personal war with Pope Sixtus IV. Faced with losing control of the city, Lorenzo enlists Guid'Antonio to investigate the weeping painting. Now, following a seemingly unrelated trail of clues—a name whispered in the marketplace by a hooded monk, a secret message Sandro Botticelli has painted in a fresco in the Vespucci church—Guid’Antonio and Amerigo chase across fifteenth-century Florence to the workshops of Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli, to churches where colorful frescoes fly off the walls, from Florence to San Gimignano, where the kidnapped girl disappeared, and, finally, to the hilltop town of Vinci, where Guid'Antonio uncovers the thought-provoking truth about the girl and the Virgin Mary's mysterious—and miraculous?—tears.