As a young guide for Sunshine Tours Armino Fabbio leads a pleasant if humdrum life -- until he becomes circumstantially involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome The woman he gradually comes to realise was his family's beloved servant many years ago in his native town of Ruffano He returns to his birthplace & once there finds it is haunted by the phantom of his brother Aldo shot down in flames in '43 Over five hundred years before the sinister Duke Claudio known as The Falcon lived his twisted brutal life preying on the people of Ruffano But now it is the twentieth century & the town seems to have forgotten its violent history But have things really changed? The parallels between the past & present become ever more evident