06 Oct Ken Tentarelli The Blackest Time #HistoricalFiction #Medieval #ItalianHistoricalFiction #Plague #BlackDeath #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub @cathiedunn

FEATURED AUTHOR: KEN TENTARELLI

I’m delighted to host Ken Tentarelli as the featured author in The Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour being held between September 29th – October 10th, 2025. Ken Tentarelli is the author of the historical fiction, The Blackest Time, published by Black Rose Writing on September 25, 2025 (268 pages). 

Below are highlights of The Blackest Time, Ken Tentarelli’s author bio, and the author’s guest post about actual historical events just prior and during the plague in Italy. 

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

HIGHLIGHTS: THE BLACKEST TIME

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.

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

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

GUEST POST: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE BLACKEST TIME

Readers of historical fiction expect authenticity. Sure, the stories are fiction, but it’s important for them to portray historical settings and events accurately. I delighted in finding unusual tidbits while doing research for my historical mystery series set during the Renaissance. Often I’d spend more time doing research than writing. While searching for inspiration for a new book, I drifted back to the history of the 1300s and discovered three events that happened around the same time. Those three events inspired me to write The Blackest Time.

The first event chronologically was a triple conjunction of planets that occurred in the year 1345. Prophets believed God arranged the formations of stars and planets to serve as omens of future events on Earth. Jupiter and Saturn were considered to be water planets by the prophets who claimed their appearance close together in the sky meant a flood was coming.

Triple conjunctions—three planets close together in the sky—were rare celestial events that occurred only once every hundred years or so. The triple conjunction in the year 1345 included the planet Mars, the god of war, which prophets saw as a sign of something much worse than a flood, although they couldn’t say exactly what tragedy the future held.

The second event of note was incessant rain that began in 1346 and continued for two years. According to the seers, the rains were foretold, but something more ominous was yet to come. Rain caused crop failures throughout central Europe. Initially, merchants who brought goods to markets in the cities from farms in the countryside compensated by traveling greater distances to get enough vegetables to fill their wagons. When the situation worsened, governments took extraordinary measures to get food supplies so food shortages didn’t become famines. The Republic of Florence, which included the seaport city of Pisa, sent ships as far as Sicily for grain so Florentine bakers could make bread.

Farm families, forced to leave their farms when crops failed, went to the cities where they added to the number of poor unable to find work. In The Blackest Time, the family of Gino, the main character, is one of those driven from their farms. Like many others, their livelihood was lost, but they were fortunate to find support from relatives living in Pisa.

After two years of nearly constant rain, the prophecy culminated in the Black Plague, which arrived in Florence in March 1348. Arguably the worst tragedy in our history, it claimed nearly half the population of Europe. Florence, one of Europe’s major cities, went from a population of 120,000 to 50,000.

People responded to the plague in different ways. Doctors realized their treatments couldn’t cure the sick, but at great risk to themselves, they continued to treat family members of the afflicted, hoping to contain the spread of the plague. The staff at Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Florence provided food, clean beds, nursing care and spiritual care to patients.

Some people believed the plague was sent by God to punish sinners, and they looked for scapegoats to blame for the tragedy. The Blackest Time depicts the situation of women falsely accused of witchcraft by Gino saving a woman healer from prosecution by helping her flee the city during the night. Many believed that bad air was responsible for the plague, and they sought the most powerful perfume scent available, hoping it would dispel the poisoned air. Wealthy people with villas in the countryside simply fled the city.

To address the possibility that poor air quality was responsible for the disease, the city government implemented regulations to improve hygiene. They had trash removed from the streets, had the streets washed every night, banned foods that rotted quickly from being imported, and made butchers dispose of spoiled meat. Those measures deprived disease-bearing rodents of food, which lowered the rodent population and ended the epidemic. The Black Plague claimed 70,000 people in Florence in only six months.

Now, having described how terrible life was in the 14^th century, I need to say The Blackest Time isn’t about the horror; it’s about the ways ordinary people, filled with compassion, love, ambition, and courage, coped and survived. I hope readers will find it an inspiring tale—a testament to the strength of the human spirit in overcoming unimaginable adversity.

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