Excerpt from Leonora D'orco, Vol. 1 of 3: A Historical Romance The world was in a very strange state just then. The resurrection of art - the recovery of letters - the new birth of science, marked out the age as one of extraordinary development; but the state of society from which all these bright things sprang - flowers rising from a dunghill was one of foul and filthy fermentation, where every wickedness that the corrupt heart of man can devise worked and travailed for the birth of better things. That pass, in those good old times, saw every day as much high-handed wrong and ruthless bloodshed as any pass in all Italy at the present time. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.