This is the comic/tragic story of three people caught up in a chaotic world beginning in Tuscany during the rise of Mussolini and ending in Bethel, Massachusetts, during the pre-war Great Depression. The novel is a tapestry of colorful characters who weave in and out of the lives of its three major characters: Damiano di Cappo, his bastard son, Giacomo, and Sofia, who is earth mother and conscience-pricker to both. Damiano is the wild, sexually obsessed son of Florentine nobility. Giacomo, idiot- and artist-savant, was conceived through Damianoas adolescent passion for the voluptuous and much older family servant, Mariella. Sofia, a mail-order bride from a southern Italian village, arrives in Bethel in time to attend the wake of her intended husband-to-be and, thus, faces the fate of a stranger in a strange land. Back in Italy, the headstrong Damiano, in a savage rage, accidentally kills his father, whose ostensible goodness he despairs ever attaining. Damiano flees from Italy with an unwanted Giacomo at his heels. In Switzerland, he has a mysterious and chilling encounter with a beautiful woman, who he comes to believe is an agent of the devil and who holds his soul in bondage. In a peculiar twist of fate, Damiano and Giacomo set sail for America. There, Damianoas encounters with Sofia cause him to believe that she is the agent of his salvation. This obsession leads to a violently bizarre climax, wherein Sofia is hailed as a saint by some and a sinner by others, and Giacomo, in his paintings, mocks the father he once adored.