Spending a spring among the archives of Siena, the narrator walks out each evening to an old well on the road to Monte Oliveto, where a Franciscan scholar, Father Adone Doni, tells him stories that never got into the books: how Saint Francis saw Saint Clare's face in the water, how a satyr came to be buried as a saint, how the painter Buffalmacco fooled his neighbours, and the long history of Fra Giovanni, who takes the Gospel at its word. Anatole France, the son of a Paris bookseller, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921. Fifty-seven plates range from Benozzo Gozzoli's fifteenth-century frescoes of Sienese miracles to Edvard Munch's figures, matching the tales of saints and sinners told beside the well.
