Book Title: The Blackest Time

Series: n/a

Author Name: Ken Tentarelli

Publication Date: September 25,2025

Publisher:  Black Rose Writing

Pages: 268

Genre:  Historical Fiction

Any Triggers: n/a

Twitter Handle: @cathiedunn @marylschmidt

Instagram Handles: @KenTentarelliAuthor @thecoffeepotbookclub

Hashtags: #HistoricalFiction #Medieval #ItalianHistoricalFiction #Plague #BlackDeath #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2025/08/blog-tour-the-blackest-time-by-ken-tentarelli.html

Book Title and Author Name:

The Blackest Time

by Ken Tentarelli

Blurb: 

Set in the 1300s during the devastating black plague, The Blackest Time is a powerful tale of compassion, love, and the human spirit’s ability to endure immense adversity.

Gino, the central character, is a young man who leaves his family’s farm to find work in a pharmacy in Florence. His experiences show us how people coped in the most horrific time in history.

Shortly after Gino arrived in the city, two years of incessant rain destroyed crops in the countryside, leading to famine and despair in the city. Gino offers hope and help to the suffering— he secures shelter for a woman forced to leave her flooded farm, rescues a young girl orphaned by the plague, and aids others who have lost everything.

The rains had barely ended when the plague hit the city, exposing the true character of its people. While some blamed others for the devastation, the story focuses on the compassionate acts of neighbors helping each other overcome fear and suffering. Doctors bravely risk infection to care for their patients. A woman healer, wrongly accused of witchcraft and driven from the city, finds a new beginning in a village where her skills were appreciated.

Despite the hardships, love blossoms between Gino and a young woman he met at the apothecary. Together they survive, finding strength in each other and hope in a world teetering on the edge.

Ken Tentarelli guest blog for When Angels Fly

The Blackest Time takes place in Florence, Italy, during a time when two consecutive events combined to make it the most horrific period in history. Starting in 1346, two years of unrelenting rain ruined farm crops, which brought the city close to famine. Just when the rains subsided, the Black Plague struck the city and claimed more than half its population.

Those terrible events form a backdrop, but the story isn’t about the disasters; it’s about the compassion and courage of the people who coped with the incredible adversity. Gino, the book’s central character, is a young man who moved from his family’s farm to Florence to find work in an apothecary shop. Through his experiences, we see how people supported each other to overcome extraordinary hardship. Working in an apothecary shop, Gino encountered a broad cross section of Florentine society: doctors, merchants, government officials, working folk and affluent businessmen. Each of them revealed an aspect of life during the plague. It was these differences that I found fascinating and wanted to capture in the book.

Today, we know today the plague was caused by bacteria carried on fleas carried by rodents. Medieval Florentines believed it was caused by bad air. The apothecary shop where Gino worked sold not only medicines but also perfumes, elixirs, and pigments for artists. People came into the shop every day asking for the most pungent perfume, hoping the scent would dispel the bad air. The strongest scent Gino could prepare was made from gardenia flowers. The perfume helped people smell nice, a good thing because they didn’t bathe very often in those days, but the perfume did nothing to combat the plague.

Doctors found that their traditional treatments were useless against the plague, but they bravely went into the homes of the sick, risking their own health to treat family members. They believed that balancing bodily fluids would keep people from contracting the plague. (The practice of balancing bodily fluids began two thousand years ago in the time of Hippocrates and continued to the 19^th century.)

The plague fractured the cohesive Florentine society. Before the plague, Florence was a prosperous industrial city where people worked in shops and mills. Its silk and woolen mills exported fabric across Europe. Families and extended families were important. People cared about the relatives and neighbors and visited them often. 

The plague drove people to act out of fear and desperation. Some thought sinners had displeased God, so He sent the plague as punishment. They looked for scapegoats to blame for God’s displeasure. In the book, Gino befriended a woman healer who had been treating poor people who couldn’t afford to see a doctor. When rumors spread claiming she was making potions and practicing witchcraft, Gino, at his own personal risk, helped her flee the city in the middle of the night to avoid being burned as a witch. He brought her to a village that had no doctor and was thankful to have a healer.

Florentines were devout Christians. Families went to Mass together every Sunday. When the plague came, people started going to Mass several times a week. Old women gathered at churches in the afternoons to say the rosary. Yet despite their faith, when people started blaming each other, even the priests didn’t escape. The Blackest Time illustrates this with a scene where a priest proclaimed God sent the plague because people lacked humility. A lumberjack attending the mass became outraged and challenged the priest, shouting, “Look at me. I’m wearing my best tunic, and it’s all frayed. You’re wearing fine silk vestments. You replaced your pewter chalice with one of silver. If anyone lacks humility, it is you priests.”

The anger of the lumberjacks was one way people reacted to the hardships. Rather than confront the problems, some wealthy men fled the city with their families in carriages to villas in the countryside. When these owners of the shops and mills left the city, they shut the factories and left their employees without jobs, worsening an already difficult situation.

While some people cast blame and some fled, others dedicated themselves to helping the less fortunate. Men’s groups called confraternities, organized by churches, sponsored shelters run by nuns. Despite the confraternities’ best efforts, the shelters were overwhelmed by farm families who had fled to the city when their crops were ruined.

Overall responsibility for the welfare of its people fell to the Signoria, the city’s government officials. With the central market nearly empty because of crop failures, the Signoria dispatched ships to Sicily to purchase grain so the city’s bakers could make bread. During the plague, the Signoria subscribed to the belief that bad air was responsible for the pestilence, and instituted measures to improve hygiene. They had trash removed from the streets, had the streets swept every night, and banned highly perishable foods from being brought into the city. These measures deprived the disease-bearing rodents of food, thereby decreasing the rodent population and ultimately ending the plague. They also forced prostitutes to leave the city—you can speculate for yourself why the Signoria expected this measure might help combat the plague.

When we think back to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, beyond the misfortune and tragedy, we remember the first responders: nurses, doctors, emts and others who worked tirelessly to treat the afflicted. Similarly, I hope readers of The Blackest Time will look beyond the plague itself and appreciate the resilience and caring of the people who supported each other during that horrible time.

The Blackest Time is a testament to the strength of the human spirit in overcoming unimaginable tragedy.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link:  https://books2read.com/u/bPO08J

Author Bio:

Ken Tentarelli is a frequent visitor to Italy. In travels from the Alps to the southern coast of Sicily, he developed a love for its history and its people.

He has studied Italian culture and language in Rome and Perugia, background he used in his award-winning series of historical thrillers set in the Italian Renaissance. He has taught courses in Italian history spanning time from the Etruscans to the Renaissance, and he’s a strong advocate of libraries and has served as a trustee of his local library and officer of the library foundation.

When not traveling, Ken and his wife live in beautiful New Hampshire.

Author Links:

Website:   https://KenTentarelli.com

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ken.tentarelli.3/

Instagram:    https://www.instagram.com/kententarelliauthor/

Book Bub:  https://www.bookbub.com/authors/ken-tentarelli

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ken-Tentarelli/author/B07PDYZ34Q

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18920645.Ken_Tentarelli