In 1700, a Venetian priest, Fra Benedict Loredan, compiles an assembly of documents
- letters, written confessions, top-secret state files, diary excerpts, pieces of a secret chronicle
- which together tell the story of two lovers caught up in a dangerous & controversial revolutionary movement which attempted to do away with the two-tiered city of Venice: Leonardo da Vinci's architectural dream to segregate the rich & the poor described in his Notebooks & realised in this novel. At the centre of the narrative are two written confessions, one by a young girl from an aristocratic family
- Loredana Loredan Contarini
- who writes of her disastrous marriage to a sadomasochistic tyrant & her subsequent involvement with a revolutionary Friar
- himself the second confessor. As both struggle to tell their tales & confess their sins, we are shown around the city of Venice as it might have been in the sixteenth-century & given pieces of a narrative which together form an explosive whole.