Character Showcase - Truzia Crollalanza

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

Truzia Crollalanza, the youngest of three daughters, is trying to find her way and her purpose in the world. And while she’s working it all out, she’s writing it in her diary—a little book that has become her friend and confidante.

“Just as Cesca’s purpose is to be a wife and Viola's purpose is to be a famous artist, I am equally certain that my purpose is to fight pirates, sea-monsters and the undead. So far none have appeared (except for Signora Bianchi and Lorenzo: that maggot-brained mediocrity of male flesh), but I am ever alert to the possibilities. I will, most definitely, require new and sturdy shoes for this mission.”

Born with an inquisitive mind, but an unprepossessing face, ill-tempered and inept at most things she attempts, the third daughter possesses neither Cesca's angelic countenance and determined optimism, nor Viola's unruffled elegance, calculating mind and quickness of wit. While Truzia’s temper makes her thoughts and intentions an open book, her guilt plain upon her face after any wrong-doing, Cesca claims never to do anything that might necessitate keeping a secret, and Viola never gives anything away, her lips and ears being a final, tomb-like resting place for any gossip or information fallen in her path.

It is very tiresome, she complains in her diary, to be the first girl suspected when the plum sauce is found spilled and the remains of a cheesecake vanished from the pantry shelf.

While her sisters have extraordinary talents, Truzia does not recognize her own until she begins to have visions of the future— including a vision of what she believes to be her own death. These premonitions show her many curious things, most of which she decides not to tell her sisters, for they would never believe the half of it. Viola would roll her eyes and sigh, while Cesca would pat her on the head and laugh.


Truzia is the daughter always in trouble. In addition to that guilty face “fit for the gallows”, she has a temper too quick to flare and outspoken opinions that she finds impossible to contain. Worse even than all this, Truzia is over-brimming with questions about life and the world, in a time when women are meant to accept their passive role in life, do as they’re told by the men who rule, and never suggest they might be entitled to better. Since she seldom gets any sensible answers from the people around her, she writes all her ponderings down in her diary.


Many hundreds of years later, Truzia’s “Pensiero del Giorno” musings will be discovered and read by two other heroines – one during the reign of Queen Victoria and another in the present day. And Truzia’s diary will help them to see their own lives with new eyes. Perhaps it will help them find their own way to new hope and happiness too.


As Truzia writes in her diary:

“We are all tiny, flickering lights that burn briefly in the hugeness of being. Our bodies float uncertainly through life, buoyed upright by bags of air under our ribs, the purpose for our existence quite unknown. But nobody is insignificant, nobody is gone that is not missed, nobody born who never touched another soul, even if they are unaware of the mark they left behind. Every life is a maze with many turns. Every life has a tale worth the telling.”

Of course, we cannot believe everything we read in her diary, because Truzia also has a vivid imagination that can make the dreariest of daily routine become a dramatic and bloody event. She did, after all, earn a living from the art of make-believe and it could be that none of this ever happened at all.


But maybe it did.


THE CROLLALANZAS is available now.

(Image: Study of the Head of a Young Woman by Andrea del Sarto 1486-1530)