I would love to see someone try to make a movie, even a movie trilogy, out of this book. It's so action-packed and some of the things that happen in the book are so crazy that you'd swear that such things were only possible in dreams, wild imaginings, and movies.

There's so much that happens to Cellini over the course of one lifetime that it's hard to believe that it actually happened; it's even crazier that some of Cellini's autobiography has been confirmed by historians, though if you want to find out which parts are true and which parts are...somewhat exaggerated, you'll have to read book.

Fun Fact: This is considered to be one of the first celebrity tell-alls. For those of you doing the 9gag reading challenge, this should fulfill the "book that was originally written in a different language" check box because this autobiography was originally written in Italian.

We don’t have Leonardo da Vinci’s or Michelangelo’s memoirs. But we do have Cellini’s, and they are absolutely astonishing. They were written by Cellini during one of his many trials as a sodomite. So we have an absolutely unreliable narrator trying to show how virtuous a person he in fact really was. There was no need to discuss in his autobiography that he didn’t engage in sodomy, because that was beside the point. The point was to convince Duke Cosimo I to let him off the hook and give him some work to do. Because the trial was just a way for the Duke to make Cellini fall to his knees and be humiliated. But Cellini was a genius and knew it. As he contemplates his long adventurous life, he can’t help but sing his praises to the sky. He murdered one or two or three fellows, beat up some women, created masterpieces, defended the Pope at the siege of Rome, went to prison, saw Jesus in a vision, almost died, escaped, was betrayed by the future Pope, went to France, almost died crossing the Alps, created masterpieces to King Francis I, received a castle as a reward, left France to take care of his impoverished sister and nieces, created masterpieces for Cosimo I, was prevented from going back to Paris and so on and so forth. But don’t take my word for it. Just be mindful that these memoirs were turned into an opera by Berlioz, a Hollywood movie, a Broadway musical and and his works can be seen in Florence, New York, Vienna, Dresden and Fontainebleau.

The notes were most times annoying and the story incredible- and I mean that in the literal sense of the word.