As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures-a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. (Mar.) FYI: Rice includes a bibliography of readings for greater appreciation of the time period.With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Vittorio's painstaking narration of his biography takes so long to acquire momentum that when at one point he admits, ''This chapter ought to be over,'' even diehard readers may be tempted to agree that it's time for a new vampire for a new age. And while Vittorio's particular road to hell is a new entry in Rice's repertoire of vampirification, much of the material is familiar: the rich, brash young man transformed against his will who agonizes over his new existence. Though the narrative is presented as a tragic tale of doomed love, we know so little of the swooning, inarticulate Ursula that there's hardly any romance or suspense. His desire for revenge-and his desire for Ursula-propel him in a dizzy descent to religion's darkest side, especially after Ursula's vampire attentions render him able to see and converse with angels. Fleeing from the primal scene, he follows the fiends in search of vengeance, and instead is overcome by the devastatingly beautiful ''strega,'' the bare-shouldered Ursula. In the year 1450, he witnesses the massacre of his entire family by a band of demons. As the 16-year-old scion of a wealthy home, he rubs elbows with Cosimo de Medici and is attracted to the work of Fra Filippo Lippi, whose tormented paintings of angels mirror Vittorio's own heart. With the courtly arrogance of one who's to the manor born, Renaissance man Vittorio tells of his seduction into evil immortality. While there's not much plot to this lushly described story of how Vittorio di Riniari became a vampire, there's plenty of period detail about Italy's Golden Age. Blood and holy water both run thick through the streets of 15th-century Florence in Rice's 21st novel of the undead, the second in a series of New Tales that leave New Orleans's cemeteries behind.

Vittorio the vampire