I read the online text. A spectacular story of one of the heroes of the Italian Renaissance. B-L is very flowery, wordy and melodramatic--typical Victorian overwrought novel. Interesting, enjoyable novel of 14th century Italian Renaissance taking place mainly in Rome. It is set against the background of the Guelph [Orsini family]/Ghibelline [Colonna family] conflict. Adventure follows the writing conventions of its day, which are turgid to modern people, but the story is memorable. Rienzi's rise/fall/rise/fall is detailed, ending with Rome in flames. Interwoven are two love stories: Rienzi and Nina, the lady who becomes his wife; also Rienzi's sister, Irene, and a young nobleman, Adrian di Castello. The villain gets his comeuppance. I can see why B-L was popular in his day and why Wagner chose this as a subject for his first successful opera, still performed today occasionally, albeit excerpted or truncated.

Still keeping B-L's basic style, about half the text could have been excised for modern readers. I hope someone will do this someday, giving this novel a chance at more exposure. The long boring digressions explaining history or quoting from earlier writers could have been done away with, or at least abbreviated. B-L also included an interesting essay on the historical Cola di Rienzi, who was considered in the 19th century as a nationalist figure during the Risorgimento.

Recommended as a Victorian period piece about a fascinating period of history. ( )

This book is probably the first one I read following an automatic recommendation found on LT. And I rather enjoyed it, except that the copy I bought from e-Bay—and printed in 1848—used a 2-column type-setting and a very small font. But this is not Bulwer-Lytton's fault.

One has to get accustomed to Bulwer-Lytton's prose, which can be confusing in the first pages. He can get tedious by his pomposity at times, and I avow that some chapters, especially in the first part of the book, are very slow. But in the middle of all this pomposity and slowness, I found very nice sentences which would be worth to read aloud, for their rythm and sonority. When Bulwer-Lytton describes knights defying themselves and throwing gages, I had the impression to read lines from Shakespeare's Richard The Second.

A most interesting passage is the description of plague in Florence in the mid 14c. It was of special interest to me because I read Rienzi just after having read Pepys's Diary 1665 where Pepys describes the plague epidemy in London that year. There are quite similar statements, for instance the common belief that good humour and cheerfulness were a protection against the disease. I wonder if Bulwer-Lytton could have been inspired by the first edition of Pepys's Diary which was probably published at the time Rienzi was composed...

The book ends up in an apocalysm that could have been written by Wagner himself—but he made an opera of it, after all. The whole story could have also made a good movie, at least in the peplum era, some 40 years ago.

As a whole, the book is extremely instructive about the state of Italy at the end of the Middle Ages. And after having read it, I still cannot understand why Bulwer-Lytton continues to be so despised and unrecognized, his name being absolutely unknown to the French public, for instance. 'Tis more than an anomaly—'tis a shame. ( )