The Duke

In a remote village nestled in the Dolomites, the last of an aristocratic line faces a modern moral reckoning. Matteo Melchiorre’s The Duke is a richly woven tale of legacy, land, and identity. When a local powerbroker encroaches on his ancestral estate, the reclusive Duke must choose between passive retreat and bold confrontation. A gripping, panoramic narrative in the tradition of 19th-century epics, this novel explores timeless tensions—privilege, belonging, and our bond with nature—in a compelling twenty-first-century light.

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?

Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Valorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.