BELLEVUE, Wash.
Two centuries of Rome’s wars seen from the wrong end of the record, from the First Punic War to a legionary’s forty-year march to the edge of Han China. All three standalone novels are now available in English and Italian, two of them in Romanian.
Historical novelist Alessandro Catorcini has completed The Shield Triptych, three standalone novels bound not by a plot or a recurring cast but by a single object: a Roman shield, and what it means to carry one, lose one, or watch it outlast the man beneath it.
The novels are about the people history hurries past. Not the consuls whose names were cut into columns, but the engineer who drew the ships; not the generals who won the battles, but the farmer’s son who lived through the worst defeat Rome ever suffered and spent fourteen years deciding what that made him.
“I write about the people the record leaves out,” the author said. “The soldiers who survived the battles that made other men famous, and the makers whose inventions outlived their names. The stone remembers the consul. It almost never remembers who built the thing that won.”
The three books span roughly two hundred years and can be read in any order:
- The Hammer and the Shield (264 BC, the First Punic War): Follows Manius Fabricius, a senator’s son who reads hulls the way other men read glory. When his father and brother drown in the strait at Scylla, the family calls it valor and Manius knows it was error. He answers with an invention: an iron-beaked boarding bridge that nails enemy ships to Roman decks and turns the sea into a battlefield Rome cannot lose. The bridge wins Rome the water. The column in the Forum names the consul. And the device that conquered the sea carries a flaw only its maker can see.
Buy / Review: Amazon (EN) · Google Play (EN) · Amazon (IT) · Google Play (IT) · Goodreads - The Shield Left Behind (216 BC, the Second Punic War): Opens on the day the largest army Rome had ever raised was swallowed whole beside the river Aufidus. Titus Labonius lived, and could never afterward say for certain whether he had lain still beneath the dead a heartbeat longer than a brave man would have. Marked with the disgraced legiones Cannenses and shipped to rot in Sicilian exile, he keeps the one thing he did not throw away, and soldiers fourteen years the long way home toward Zama and Hannibal’s final defeat.
Buy / Review: Amazon (EN) · Google Play (EN) · Amazon (IT) · Google Play (IT) · Lulu (RO) · Google Play (RO) · Goodreads - The Farthest Shield (53 BC, Carrhae): Sends Lucius Ateporix Vettius east and never brings him back. Sold across the steppe after Rome’s worst defeat of the age, he walks for forty years past the Oxus and the Talas, into the service of warlords and the gaze of a Han general, toward a town at the edge of the known world. The novel draws on the Lost Legion hypothesis, the proposal that survivors of Carrhae ended their long march as the Han frontier county of Liqian.
Buy / Review: Amazon (EN) · Amazon (IT) · Lulu (RO) · Google Play (RO) · Goodreads
The author was born in Genoa, Italy, and writes in both Italian and English, translating and editing his own Italian editions rather than licensing them out. The Farthest Shield and The Shield Left Behind are also available in Romanian.
“The Mediterranean I grew up on was not a backdrop, it was a workplace,” the author said. “Ships got built badly and people drowned. Men walked east because walking east was the only thing left. I wanted to write that world at eye level, from inside a life that history never bothered to write down.”
The three novels are available now in paperback and ebook. Full details, sample chapters, and buy links for every edition are at www.catorcini.com.
Book Details
|
Title |
Setting | Formats | Editions |
|
The Hammer and the Shield |
First Punic War, 264 BC |
Paperback, ebook |
English, Italian (Il Martello e lo Scudo) |
|
The Shield Left Behind |
Cannae to Zama, 216–202 BC | Paperback, ebook | English, Italian (Lo Scudo Abbandonato), Romanian (Scutul Lăsat în Urmă) |
| The Farthest Shield | Carrhae to the Han frontier, 53 BC onward |
Paperback, ebook |
English, Italian (Lo Scudo Più Lontano), Romanian (Scutul cel mai îndepărtat) |
About the Author
Alessandro Catorcini writes literary historical fiction set in the less-told corners of the ancient world. Born in Genoa, Italy, he studied Latin and Greek in school and fell in love with the classical world then; the novels are what that love turned into. He lives in Bellevue, Washington, where he works as a technology executive, and he writes in both Italian and English.
Media Contact Details
Alessandro Catorcini
Email: Send Email
Website: www.catorcini.com
Last modified: August 18, 2026
