Excerpt from The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence by Alyssa Palombo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I am," I said.

Signor Vespucci looked startled as he turned to me. "You, Madonna Simonetta?"

I had received only a rudimentary education: reading and writing, and simple figures. Yet I had often persuaded my tutor—an old and kindly priest—to let me read the histories of such figures as Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. And from there we went, naturally, to poetry.

Yet when I'd reached the age of thirteen, my parents had sent Padre Valerio away, saying it was an unnecessary expense to continue to pay him. I had already learned as much and more as was needed to be a lady and a wife. "No man wants a wife as well learned as he is," my father had said, with my mother nodding emphatically beside him. "And a girl as beautiful as you has no need of books."

They would not let me continue my lessons, no matter how I begged. So I began to read on my own, my father's volumes and those I asked him to purchase for me. The copy of Dante that had caught Signor Vespucci's attention, however, had been a gift to me from Padre Valerio—one of several such gifts, bless him.

"Indeed. I wonder at your surprise, signore. Because so many noblewomen are uneducated, did you assume that I was among their number?"

My father frowned at me in warning, but I paid no heed.

"Why, no," Signor Vespucci said, recovering. "It is just that it is quite the tome, and one does not always expect a young lady—"

Narrowing my eyes at him, I quoted, "'Good Leader, I but keep concealed/From thee my heart, that I may speak the less/Nor only now has thou thereto disposed me.'"

My mother laughed nervously. "Simonetta…"

Yet Signor Vespucci ignored her, and again met my eyes. "'So I beheld more than a thousand splendors/Drawing towards us, and in each was heard: "Lo, this is she who shall increase our love."'"

Neither of us looked away for a long moment, longer than was appropriate. I felt a strange skip in my heart. It was nothing like the tormented passion Dante described, and yet still I felt my skin flush and my breath quicken.

This time it was I who looked away first.

"You would be in high favor among the Medici circle, Madonna Simonetta," Signor Vespucci said after a moment of heavy silence, a faint huskiness in his tone. "You have in abundance the two things most prized there: beauty and poetry."

"Indeed?" I asked, struggling to compose myself.

"Si. Lorenzo de' Medici is following in the tradition of his grandfather, the great Cosimo, and is gathering about him the brightest and most gifted minds he can find: poets, scholars, artists. Nowhere in Italy—in the world, no doubt—are the arts held in such high esteem."

I allowed myself to imagine it. Brilliant men, artists, all in attendance on the Medici, discussing their ideas and their art. Would they welcome a woman in their midst? Perhaps, for even here in Genoa we had heard of the formidable Lucrezia dei Tornabuoni, mother to the Medici brothers Lorenzo and Giuliano, an intelligent and well-read woman in her own right.

"I should like to see it," I said, smiling at my suitor.

I did not realize it then, but in the weeks that followed I would look back on that moment as the one in which I had made my decision.

Excerpted from The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence by Alyssa Palombo. Copyright © 2017 by Alyssa Palombo. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Griffin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.