NS Name: Kwadai
Character Name: Lorenzo Ignazio Vicario
Appearance: Lorenzo
Age: 298
Maker: Quaestor of Venice
City of Origin: Venice (Venetian Republic)
Abilities: Basic abilities: Stealth, Advances Abilities: Hypnosis
Religion: Roman Catholic
Languages Spoken: Italian (Venetian), Latin & English
Biography:
Lorenzo was born in 1465 in the city of Venice on Italy’s Adriatic coast to a wealthy family of silk merchants who traded in luxury goods of the east. His family was one of the city’s most highly regarded merchants specialising in fabrics. Not restricted to silk, they preceded over the production and sales of velvet, one of the most sought after luxuries in the city and the wider medieval world. Their collections attracted diverse and important clientele ranging from royalty and aristocracy to papal cardinals, and traders from across Europe who descended in Venice, indicative of the city’s position as the beating heart of trade in the Mediterranean. Naturally, it seemed Lorenzo himself would ascend to fill the role of his family, and this would likely have been the case had his life not taken the dark road it would soon follow.
The Vicario family having amassed great wealth, splurged on an extravagant lifestyle, sponsoring artists and architects to enhance their property and enjoy all the pleasures late 15th century Venice had to offer. In his twenties, Lorenzo too became known in merchant circles for his flamboyant personality and extravagant way of life. Furthermore, now a well established member of the luxury textile trade and accustomed to the practices of Venetian merchant culture he became an acquaintance of the vampiric Quaestor of Venice, although of course this was unknown to him at that time. The quaestor was a regular client and over time, as he developed a closer connection to the young man, he made the decision to turn Lorenzo, perhaps believing him to be of potential, a valuable addition for the vampiric society of La Serenissima.
Therefore, overcome by his new reality, Lorenzo retreated from the public eye of the silk trade and instead operated quietly from the shadows organising trade by day from the dark interior of his ancestral residence while his siblings handled external affairs unaware of their brother’s condition, believing him to be ill. However, even though his daytime activity had been curtailed, it instead manifested in the hours of the night. Lorenzo stalked the narrow alleyways to happen upon unfortunate humans sustaining his insatiable lust for blood, while living amongst the city vampires until the sunrise where his hedonistic attitude and flamboyance remained an integral part of his character. As a vampire, Lorenzo remained unchanged even as those around him grew old and passed from the world of the living while he continued his cycle of feasting and indulgence under the cover of nightfall.
Eventually as the decades of the 1500s rolled past, the vampire took to brief stints in various cities around Italy’s kingdoms; Naples, Florence, Spanish controlled Palermo, and even Rome, to lavish in the flourishing artistic culture of the Renaissance in the 16th century and bloodlust frenzies. He even acted as a patron to aid the growth and talents of Italian artists. Despite the satisfaction he received from this period, and the thrill of living right under the nose of the Vatican in Rome, Lorenzo could not help but return to his home in Venice, longing to one again live amongst the riches of the Orient and the sea, as well as being back within the domain of his maker. There was of course, the added freedom (well, what freedom he could avail of as a vampire that is) he was able to experience under the somewhat less zealous Venetian rule as opposed to the more stringently Catholic Rome.
The revelry of Carnevale di Venezia, masquerade and it’s seventeenth century revival provided a major preoccupation for Lorenzo as he continued his role supplying fabrics to the city elite while he watched the years take their toll on the city state. Venice’s influence as the primary trade centre dwindled while ports in the Netherlands, England and Portugal thrived as Western Europe expanded colonial pursuits. Soon after he began to hear tales of the new world, conquered by the British, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese where new cities and a new culture of vampires was readily emerging. Interest piqued and following a succession of territorial losses to the Ottoman Empire, and plagues spreading through Venice diminishing a notable segment of its population, the autumn of 1762 saw Lorenzo, a fifteenth century Venetian board an English ship with whatever of his positions he could safely bring along in the night, about to leave behind the old world of Europe into the unknown, across the Atlantic, to settle in Boston a fledging port in the north eastern territories of New England.
#CoB1764 [APP CODE, DO NOT DELETE]
