November 1st, 1755 - All Saints' Day - dawns as a radiant feast day in Lisbon, Europe's most prosperous capital. Neither the King and his family, nor the court or the city's inhabitants, military officers and engineers, the prisons' convicts, surgeons, friars and nuns, prostitutes, diplomats and the common folk, can image they are about to experience the greatest natural disaster ever to hit the...

August 1944, Le Nuove Prigioni (New Jale) in Turin. A young nun takes the baby of a prisoner in transit through Birkenau, puts him to sleep with a cloth soaked in wine and slips him into the dirty laundry trolley. You know, the laundry is not the business of the Germans, and most of the time the trolleys go in and out of the walls without being searched. More than fifty years later Aila, who...

Julia D’Aubigny is an orphan and the lover of the most powerful man in the court of the “sun king”. Chiripa (“sparkle”) is a child prodigy of fencing. Giulio Aubini is a gelded man who is wanted for theft, fire setting and grave robbing. Maupin, the first contralto in the history of Opera, is a disguised bisexual, the muse of composers and poets and the lover of princes, nuns, generals...

France, during the Thirty Years’ War: When Cardinal Richelieu sends Léon Bouthillier, his Secretary of State and chief spy, on a hazardous personal mission into enemy territory, Léon cannot anticipate he will have to track down and destroy a woman who is extremely dangerous to France’s interests, in order to recover a batch of letters which compromise the very safety of the realm. This...