Some considerations about Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (2008)

To begin with and Rushdian intertextuality Reading a fine book and then coming to its finishing I begin to feel sad because tomorrow I shall not meet these people, figures, personalities, whom I have begun to like while reading the novel (of course one may ar-gue that I can reread the book from the first page tomorrow, but this, of course, is not the point). It is as if Salman Rushdie in his novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008) wants to make the reader understand such a feeling. When, at the end of the novel, Niccolò Vespucci having ended his story, has himself, disappeared, Mughal emperor Akbar has a feeling of deep disappointment, considering: Vespucci’s story was concluded. He had crossed over into the empty page after the last page, beyond the illuminated borders of the existing world, ...1） By the way, even in this sentence of the story, as everywhere in the novel, there seem to be at least two levels or a double sense of meaning, that is “the illuminated borders ” may be read as well as the borders of the painted Mughals ’ world in its miniatures. It should be mentioned at once that S. Rushdie adds a “Bibliography” Travelling through times and spaces: Making to meet Akbar with Machiavelli