The Mirror of Diana: A Novel of War and Love [Paperback]

"A compelling novel...Historically accurate...gives us all a new faith in the future of mankind...Bravissimo!" -- Rosario D'Agato, President of Association Dianae Lacus

"Gripping...a hold-your-breath page-turner...Will appeal to a wide audience...A tale you won't forget!" -- Lou Stanek, Ph.D., author of So You Want to Write a Novel

The time is 1943, a time of war. The place is the hill-perched town of Nemi, in the Alban Hills south of Rome, overlooking the crater lake where, 2000 years before, the Roman emperor Caligula sailed his gigantic ships to the Temple of Diana. Just a few years before the war, the ancient ships, sunk after Caligula's death, were miraculously recovered from the lake and placed in a lakeside museum. Paolo, the museum curator, now struggles to protect these treasures from Allied bombs and the depredations of the Germans in a world where the struggle for simple survival makes such efforts seem irrelevant. He watches with disquiet as the German occupation brings together Rosanna, his daughter, whose innocence is brutalized by the horrors of the war, and Klaus, a German officer, whose high ideals and love for Rosanna cause him soul-wrenching conflicts of loyalty. Love? Or duty? The Mirror of Diana tells the poignant story of Klaus and Rosanna's secret love against the backdrop of war-torn Italy and one of the war's great unsolved mysteries: why were the fabulous ships of Caligula reduced to ashes in the midst of war? The answer may have been foretold in the legend sculpted on The Mirror of Diana.

When I first set eyes on Lake Nemi, a cobalt-blue disc nestled in an extinct volcanic crater, I had the same reaction as Sir James Frazer, as immortalized in the opening lines of his classic, The Golden Bough: the feeling that no one who has seen this place can ever forget it. I found it beautiful, yes, but what I found even more remarkable about Lake Nemi - apart from the fact that American tourists have not yet discovered it - is its incredibly rich history, a history that stretches back 3000 years. I knew I had to write a book about it. But in my book, I wanted to show war-time Italy: what it was like to be an Italian living under German occupation, what it may have been like to have been a loyal German officer who did not support Nazism. Most of all, I wanted to imagine in the book an answer to the question of how the precious ancient ships brought up from the bottom of the lake could have been lost, all the while weaving into the story the rich and long history that surrounds them

A.R. Homer has been fascinated with World War II all his life. A native of Birmingham, England, he grew up hearing stories of privation and devastation, of ration cards and shortages, and of the bomb that almost destroyed his parents' house. As a history major at Oxford University, he developed a serious interest in World War II. Later, he moved to Normandy, France, to study the battles in which ordinary men determined the course of history. Currently, he and his wife live in New Jersey, where he is working on his next book, The Sobs of Autumn.

Prologue On the night of May 31st 1944, as the German army was retreating, two ancient ships housed in a museum by a lake south of Rome went up in flames. No one knows how. No one knows why. Everything about these ships was remarkable. They were huge floating palaces, lavishly appointed for the Roman emperor Caligula. He took his court upon them to the lakeside temple of Diana, then already centuries old, ferrying them across Lake Nemi, which the ancients called Speculum Dianae (Diana's Mirror). When Caligula was murdered in 41 A.D., the ships were sunk in the lake to expunge his memory. In 1928, after centuries of dreaming of the treasure at the bottom of the lake, Italian engineers began to recover the ships. A triumphal ceremony, Mussolini attending, was held in 1940 to celebrate the vessels' release from twenty centuries in a muddy tomb. But in only four years they were gone again, this time for good. Perhaps this is the story of their final destruction.