The Italian

Ann Radcliffe set this Gothic tale in eighteenth-century Italy, where young Vincentio di Vivaldi falls for Ellena Rosalba, a beautiful woman far below his station. His proud mother, the Marchesa, refuses the match and turns to her confessor, the monk Schedoni, a figure of cold ambition and buried guilt who becomes one of literature’s most memorable villains. What follows moves through abductions, a remote convent, a chilling near-murder, and the shadowy tribunals of the Inquisition. Radcliffe builds dread from atmosphere and slow suspense rather than open horror, and she keeps the reader guessing about what is real and what only seems supernatural. Written partly in answer to Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, it remains a high point of the Gothic mode. This free PDF and EPUB edition offers the complete novel.