The Dragon Beneath the Basilica

What sleeps beneath the foundations of the Eternal City? What ancient compact was sealed in blood and river-water long before the first stone of any basilica was ever laid? In *The Dragon Beneath the Basilica: Seven Myths of the Eternal Hill*, Alessandra Pontecorvi weaves a breathtaking tapestry of myth, memory, and sacred duty set against the timeless landscape of Rome — a Rome that exists before and beyond its monuments, pulsing with older, stranger powers.
This remarkable collection gathers seven interconnected mythic narratives, each rooted in the sacred geography of the Mons Vaticanus and the rivers, groves, and hidden sanctuaries that have shaped Roman spiritual imagination for millennia. From wounded river-gods breaking the surface of the Tiber at dawn to priestesses caught between ancient obligation and urgent, bleeding truth, Pontecorvis prose moves with the force of deep water — precise, resonant, and utterly alive.
At the heart of the collection stands a young grove-keeper whose ritual certainty begins to crack at exactly the moment she needs it most. Her voice — intimate, oblique, achingly perceptive — draws readers into a world where the sacred and the visceral are never separate, where herbs can be wrong in themselves, and where gods arrive not crowned and serene but thrashing and wounded, demanding something no handbook of ritual can prepare you for.
What distinguishes Pontecorvis work is its rare combination of rigorous mythological grounding and deeply human emotional texture. These are not retellings that polish myth into comfortable allegory. They restore its strangeness, its weight, its demand.