Complete and unabridged, with 40 full-page plates by Ippolito Caffi, Francesco Hayez and Antonio Mancini. Four young people in Rome — an American sculptor, a copyist, a dark woman with a past, and an Italian count who may not be entirely human — and a death on the Tarpeian Rock that binds them. Hawthorne's last completed novel came out of two years in Italy, and readers pestered him so persistently about the count's ears that he added a postscript refusing to explain. Forty plates of painting by Panini and Hayez and their peers, from classical ruins to captives and prisoners, run through the text and echo its Roman setting and its themes of art, confinement, and the shadowed past.