The setting is Venice. The month November. Glittering worldliness and dubious shabbiness overlap, and passion and suspicion intertwine in a three-day Venetian adventure, bookended by a train's arrival and a ship's departure. She is an elegant Roman princess who scouts for one of the large English auction houses. He is a fascinating, mysterious man of indeterminate age, the leader of a tour group. He seems to know every language and all secrets. But who is he really?

Around them are the canals and lagoons of Venice, a city which becomes a character in the novel in its own right. Poised delicately on the line between tragedy and comedy, Fruttero and Lucentini compose in this novel "a sort of Wagnerian motif held aloft by Mozart's hands." Written with elegance and wit, this is an atypical, sophisticated, elaborate novel of love and the criminal shenanigans of the Italian art world. But, at the story's core lies the deeply intriguing mystery of the guide's true identity.