It is Florence, 1691. The Renaissance is long gone, and the city is a dark repressive place where everything is forbidden and anything is possible. The Enlightenment may be just around the corner but knowledge is still the property of the few and they guard it fiercely. Art, sex and power, these, as always, are the obsessions. Facing serious criminal charges, Gaetano Zummo is forced to flee his native Siracusa at the age of 20 first to Palermo then Naples but always has the feeling that he is being pursued by his past, and that he will never be free of it.