Synopsis "Susanna: The Mother of Columbus (in English)"
On August 3, 1492, at the dawn of the age of exploration, Christopher Columbus sailed out of Palos de la Frontera in southern Spain and into history. The world changed in nearly every way it could change. Since he returned from that first voyage he has been hailed as a great navigator, an explorer, and a leader of men. More recently, others have derided Columbus as an evil and greedy man who raped and pillaged the New World in an unrelenting quest for power. What kind of man was he? Who was he...really? The historical record is spotty at best. What we do know does not point to the Admiral of the Ocean Seas or to the genocidal megalomaniac. Christopher Columbus was a travelling salesman, not a sailor. He never commanded a vessel until he sailed on the Santa Maria. He was the son of a middle class weaver turned shopkeeper and tavern owner. He appears to have been a very ordinary man, living a very ordinary life, until he washed up on the coast near Lagos, Portugal in 1476. Why, in the exploding era of Portuguese discovery, a time of hardy sailors and daring adventurers, did a Genoese sugar salesman become the man who exploded the boundaries of the world? To answer this, we have chosen to look at him through the eyes of the women in his life. Susanna, Mother of Columbus is the first in a collection of works that explores the world of Christopher Columbus before his fateful voyage. Since there is little record of the details of her life we have identified key points that are known and imagined a story that is consistent with the evidence and grounded in rigorous research. Since the actual movements and conversations of the people involved are lost to history, this must be considered a work of fiction. What has been invented are the details of personal interactions. A few supporting characters have been added. But this is as accurate as we can be from this distance. Susanna Fontanarossa was Christopher's mother. She was a girl from a tiny village in the mountains north of Genoa. She met and married Dominic Columbus. Hers is a story of love, loss, and pain. It is the story of a woman who finds herself trapped by the limitations placed on her by her friends, her husband her religion, and the time in which she lived.. Her strength is in her character and in her refusal to disappear into her husband's shadow. She chose to define her own existence. What she found was not triumph, not victory, not even success. It was survival. And in surviving she found herself. Come, meet Susanna, the mother of Columbus.
