Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Carl Spitzweg, Max Liebermann and Edvard Munch. Milan under the Austrians, 1848: a singer at La Scala is to give the signal for the rising from the stage, and half the conspirators do not trust her because her mother was English. Meredith wrote it as a sequel to Sandra Belloni and took the revolution from Italians who had fought it; the crowd scenes are the best he ever did, and the politics are unusually adult — everyone is brave and nearly everyone is wrong. Fifty-six plates of storm, harbour and opera-house scenes by painters including Munch and Achenbach carry the same theatrical weather that drives Meredith's rising.
