"Didn't anyone ever tell you? Pain and promise, they're all mixed up in our lives. A bit like good sex, really."

June, 1981: The small town of Frentana on the Adriatic coast of Italy was the last place Bobby would have suspected that his titanic struggle with being gay would come to a head. But then he hadn't reckoned on the town's evil secret weapon - Dario, a Michaelangelo man with a missionary zeal for sex with men and the tightest trousers that Bobby had ever set eyes on. But then Bobby wasn't the first Englishman in that bright land where the olive trees grow, to be dazzled and beguiled by a local boy. For there was another love story that had yet to be told. A hidden affair separated from Bobby and Dario by almost forty years. An inspiring tale of a great war-time romance between two very special young men and one with which Bobby would become strangely linked.