Can love fundamentally change people? Can it cure mental illness? Venice, 1967. The novel tells the disturbing love story of Stefano Politano, a robber from Italy, and Ida Johnson, an English teacher from America. The suicide of a doctor at the San Sèrvolo asylum for the mentally ill triggers a series of events that lead to Stefano, a patient there, telling his story to his only surviving girlfriend - Olga. It is a story that changed the lives of everyone around them, metamorphosed Stefano and ended with several tragedies. It is a tumultuous and passionate story that is tragic and heart breaking. It is a story of two extremes: a poor, orphaned young man turned criminal and the spoiled daughter of an ambassador, an English teacher - two people from two very different worlds but with common threads. It is a story that shows the rise and fall of a man, depending on his relationship with the person he loves. It is a story about mental illness, suicide, unrelenting illness, abuse, forbidden love, a world in which one of humanity's most beautiful and tragic love stories takes place. It is a different kind of love born in a world troubled by riots and economic hardship, reborn in a mental asylum that has become a stain of shame on the Italian government, unable to treat the pellagra.