Bellarion the Fortunate by Rafael Sabatini

In the vast park of Pavia the trees stood leafless and black against the white shroud of snow that covered the chilled earth. The river Ticino gurgled and swirled about the hundred granite pillars which carried the great roofed bridge, five hundred feet in length, spanning its grey and turgid waters. Beyond this, Pavia the Learned reared above white roofs her hundred snow-capped towers to the grey December sky, and beyond the city, isolated, within the girdle of a moat that was both wide and deep, stood the massive square castle, pink as coral, strong as iron, at once impregnable fortress and unrivalled palace, one of the great monuments of Viscontian power and splendour, described by Petrarch as the princeliest pile in Italy.

The pride of the place was the library, a spacious square chamber in one of the rectangular towers that rose at each of the four corners of the castle. The floor was of coloured mosaics, figuring birds and beasts, the ceiling of ultramarine star-flecked in gold, and along the walls was ranged a collection of some nine hundred manuscript parchment volumes bound in velvet and damask, or in gold and silver brocades. Their contents contained all that was known of theology, astrology, medicine, music, geometry, rhetoric, and the other sciences. This room was the favourite haunt of the lonely, morose, and studious boy, the great Gian Galeazzo's younger son, Filippo Maria Visconti, Count of Pavia.