A gentleman who has given up his name, his fortune and the woman he loved lives as a gardener in a monastery, becomes known as a healer, and finds his private conscience colliding with the Vatican that will not tolerate it. Fogazzaro was a senator from Vicenza and the leading Catholic novelist of his day; Rome put this book on the Index of forbidden works and its author obeyed the ruling — while all Italy read him. Sixty plates of garden paintings by Giovanni Boldini and Giovanni Segantini, 1853 to 1925, keep the monastery garden at the center of a story about a man who finds his conscience there.
