Four young people in Rome — an American sculptor, a copyist, a dark woman with a history, and an Italian count who may not be entirely of our species — move among galleries and ruins toward a crime none of them will name afterwards. Hawthorne's last romance is as much about the city's layered dead as about the four. Paintings of Roman sculpture, overgrown ruin and lamplight in ancient corridors, with Gilded Library ornament of the marble faun, ivy and classical fragment.