Most dark romantasy chooses its settings for one of two reasons: fantasy-adjacent geography (fog, moors, forests with no specific referent) or the American city. Florence, Italy is neither. It’s a specific real place with a specific history, a specific visual identity, and specific connotations that are doing actual work in the Dark Fae Masters of Italy series — not as local color, but as a structural element of what the story is about.
The City Has the Right History
Florence’s history is layered in a way that suits a vampire court. The city has been continuously inhabited for over 2,000 years. It was the center of the Renaissance, the seat of the Medici — a family whose combination of extreme wealth, political power, and patronage of both beauty and violence is the closest real-world analogue to how vampire courts are portrayed in fiction. A Master Vampire who has been running his own court in Florence for centuries has an entire city’s worth of layered history to be embedded in. That’s not possible in a city without deep history, and it’s less legible in a fantasy geography without real-world referents.
Quinn’s Dark Haven is rooted in the city, and the series uses Tuscany’s visual texture — described in the cover copy as “the everlasting beauty of Tuscany” — as a consistent aesthetic presence throughout. Reviewers describe the prose as “luxurious” and “decadent,” words that apply equally to the setting and to the writing style. The city’s opulence isn’t incidental; it’s earned by the setting choice.
Modern Italy as Contrast
The series is contemporary — a modern setting, not a historical one. That contrast is deliberate. Ancient vampire courts and fae realms overlaid on a contemporary Italian city creates a specific tension: the ancient and the modern occupying the same space, with the supernatural hidden within something tourists visit, photograph, and regard as merely beautiful. This is one of the pleasures of urban fantasy as a mode: the sense that the world everyone sees is a surface, and underneath it something older and more dangerous operates. Florence is a particularly legible city for this premise because the Renaissance layer is already so present in the architecture, the art, the palaces — adding a supernatural layer feels like a natural extension of a place that has always been built on the accumulation of centuries.
The Fae Realm as Counterpoint
The secondary world — the Twilight Realm — exists in contrast to Italy. The Summer Fae Courts have their own opulence, but it’s fae opulence: ancient differently, luminous where Florence is warm and textured, political in fae rather than human terms. The Winter Fae north is deliberately different again: cold, austere, a city of ice. The series uses setting contrast as a character-building tool — the worlds each hero comes from tell the reader something about who they are before any exposition.
The Book 5 ending returns the action to Florence itself — the final battle takes place beneath the city, as the trio seeks an ancient relic buried under Florence to defeat their last enemy. The city, present from the first pages of Book 1, becomes the literal ground of the series’s resolution. That’s not a setting that’s been forgotten in favor of the secondary world; it’s a setting that was always the anchor.
What This Means for the Reader
For readers who respond to setting — who read for the world as much as the romance — Dark Fae Masters of Italy offers a specific pleasure that generic fantasy-geography romantasy doesn’t. The city is real enough to anchor the supernatural, opulent enough to match the aesthetic register of vampire and fae courts, and historically layered enough to make a centuries-old vampire’s presence in it feel credible rather than convenient.
The complete series is free in Kindle Unlimited. Start with Dark Master’s Kiss — the city is present from the first pages.