The San Diego City College International Book Fair ’09 Spring Literary Series presented San Diego city College professor and award-winning author Laurel Corona, speaking about her latest work, “The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice” in the D building March 24.

In its sixth month of publications, it is already being translated into Spanish, German and French and is in its second print.

In introducing “The Four Seasons” professor Donna Watson enthusiastically spoke of how “‘Vivaldi’s Venice’ will take your breath away.”

“It leaves you hungry for more and more and more,” said Watson.

Corona has written 20 books and her previous work, “Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance,” recently received the 2009 Christopher Award.

“When you’ve written 20 books you pretty much feel like you’ve written about everything,” Corona said.

A couple of years into teaching, Corona Found a line in a humanities book about Vivaldi working with female orphan musicians in Venice. This was before Google and I-phones, but “The female orphan musicians jumped into my head and they had claws, “Corona said.

Corona did intensive research on Venice, Vivaldi and the Pieta, the orphanage in which Vivaldi worked.

Because of oligarchic attitudes towards marriage, dowries skyrocketed and many children were sent to convents/orphanages.

The particular one in Venice called the Pieta housed 900-1,000 women and girls.

Women here were very accomplished, but mostly forgotten, with the exception of being linked to their composer teacher, Vivaldi.

An enlarged slide of the Pieta women in their red and white uniforms was shown and Corona read pages from her novel.

In order to take the story out of the convent and into the culturally rich city of Venice, Corona created tow sisters, one inside the convent and one out.

“Penelope’s Daughter” and “The Laws in Motions” are two more intriguing titles soon to come from Corona.