MELORIA: an Inevitable Love at the Heart of Epic Naval Battle

War tears destinies apart. Time always finds a way to bring them back together. There are days when history seems to stand still and hold its breath. For Genoa and Pisa, that day is August 6, 1284: in the waters off Meloria, the fiercest naval battle of the Middle Ages unfolds. The Pisan fleet is wiped out, and over nine thousand men are swallowed into the hell of Genoese captivity. Among them is Tommaso, a young caulker. In Pisa, Beatrice refuses to surrender and sets off on a desperate, silent march toward the enemy city, determined to find him among the ghostly depths of the Malapaga prison. Seven centuries later, on the exact same day, two college students cross paths in the alleys of Genoa. It seems like a chance encounter, but there is no such thing as coincidence. A subtle detail is enough to crack reality open and trigger a temporal short circuit: the memory of the past resurfaces in the present to right a ruthless wrong that has hung in the balance for more than seven hundred years. MELORIA is a raw, visionary journey bridging the thirteenth century and present-day Genoa. A novel that weaves the precision of historical detail-from the atrocities of battle to the accidental birth of traditions like "cecina" in the scorching holds of the ships-with a powerful element of the fantastical.