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From inside her cell in the wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, Alix, a young Parisian recluse, observes a tumultuous world of thieves and scoundrels, rebels, heretics and pilgrims. Set during the Hundred Year's War and based on the historical figure of Alix la Bourgotte, Sealed in Stone traces the intersecting lives of a vagabond Turkish sailor, a Bohemian intellectual, the amazing Alix and a young rebel from Lombardy who finds himself powerfully drawn to her.
"Toni Maraini's Sealed in Stone, an allegorical novel set in the heart of medieval Paris, radiantly portrays the triumph of the soul over the darkness of existence. An extraordinary achievement."—Lucia A. Blackstone
" . . . a strange and necessary novel."—Alberto Moravia
Toni Maraini is an Italian poet, novelist and art critic. She grew up in an literary family in Sicily, and has lived in Paris, London, Casablanca and New York. She currently lives in Rome.
"This book has two very great merits: the ability to reconstruct in meticulous detail the particulars of medieval life, and to skillfully convey the ambience and the atmosphere of another historical period. At the same time, it shows parallels with modern times in such a way as to annul the time factor, so that the city in which the narrative takes place, 14th-century Paris, could be any city whatever in any period whatever. [The second merit] is her creation—through interior monologues and dialogues—of very finely delineated characters, each one an emblem of a complex, anguished, individual quest that, through their different lives, develops toward a single goal common to all: self-knowledge. Surfacing in this book are Alice—a religious novice by chance and a woman sealed into a wall by choice; the Lombard absorbed in a fervent desire to widen the horizons of his experience (these, then, are also two sides of the same person, the seeker within and the seeker in the world ). And above all, there is the Big Turk, a splendid figure of the mendicant-poet, who dies conscious of having found his treasure: a fistful of humble sea salt that evokes in him memories of his childhood and the trajectory of his life."—L’Eco della Stampa, Milan, Italy
Born in Tokyo (Japan), Toni Maraini spent two years (1943–1945) as a small child in a Japanese concentration camp after the family was arrested for being anti-Fascist. She grew up in Sicily after the war, and went to high school in Florence. She studied art history and anthropology at London University, at Smith College (USA) and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. From 1964 to 1986 she lived in Morocco, where she taught at Rabat University. In Morocco she did pioneer field research in art and culture. There, she published several books (essays, art history) and three collections of poems (Message d'une Migration, 1976, Le Récit de l'Occultation, 1984, Phantasmata Diwan, 1990). She works now in Italy as a freelance author (criticism, poetry, novels, essays) and continues to write on North African culture and to translate North African writers and poets.