Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Francesco Guardi, Edvard Munch and Canaletto. Italy on the eve of the Revolution: a young duke who has read the philosophers takes a small state and tries to reform it, and discovers what the peasants, the priests and his own court think of enlightenment. Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer, wrote this before the New York novels — a full-dress historical study of the eighteenth century, researched for years. It is her least-read book and the one where her intelligence is barest. Fifty-eight plates, from Canaletto's Venice to Munch's beach and forest studies, trace the eighteenth-century world of palaces, fortresses and canals this novel moves through.
