• Dante’s Numbers… some locations

    Here are some of the key locations in the seventh Nic Costa novel. Film buffs with an eye for detail may be able to guess one of the elements of the book from these shots.

    Posted on 30/01/08 | no comments | read on

  • Lucifer’s photo gallery

    A confession… these are not my original research pictures from writing Lucifer’s Shadow, but pictures taken on later visits. My first set of pictures for the book were shot on film… and lost when a Venetian photo shop destroyed the negatives.

    Posted on 29/01/08 | no comments | read on

  • What we fought for

    This is the landscape of Wye and its surrounding countryside. Much of it would have disappeared under modern, mass housing if the Wye plan had gone ahead.

    | no comments | read on

  • A chance visit that turned into the Costa series

    The Costa books came out of serendipity. I went to Rome to spend a week with the manuscript of Lucifer’s Shadow, thinking that would probably be the last novel I’d ever get published. I was about to be without a publisher and the climate was pretty grim for writers who hadn’t made it. In Rome [...]

    | 1 comment | read on

  • The Ostia connection

    With my second Roman book I began to explore the city more. A lot of the locations here are fictional. But, when not studying Italian at my language school, I began to get out of the centro storico and explore some some of the archeological areas in the suburbs and beyond.
    Here are some photos, including [...]

    | no comments | read on

  • A story set around the Pantheon

    The Pantheon is one of my favourite buildings in Rome, one to which I always return in wonder. I wanted to make it a central character in this book, and to set the story at a time when few tourists see it - in the dead of winter, when the city can be so very, [...]

    | no comments | read on

  • A return to the city in the sea

    I went back to Venice to write The Lizard’s Bite six years or so after writing Lucifer’s Shadow. Many of the locations are the same, so you may want to look at the larger picture gallery there. Why did I choose to go back? A few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to see what my characters [...]

    Posted on 28/01/08 | no comments | read on

  • The Garden of Evil gallery

    I deliberately decided to focus the entire story of The Garden of Evil in a very small area, part of Rome north of the Pantheon which, in Caravaggio’s time was known as ‘Ortaccio’, an area of rough bars, brothels, and home to many criminals and artists too, the painter included. This gives you a flavour of a part of the city which is still wonderfully chaotic and a little run-down in places today. You can also see some of the talking statues featured in the book, which were used to communicate messages during the censored times of the Popes. To find out more about them go here.

    Posted on 27/01/08 | no comments | read on

The books of David Hewson

The Rome Series

Standalone work

Tag Cloud