In 1700, a Venetian priest, Fra Benedict Loredan, compiles an assembly of documents - letters, written confessions, top-secret state files, diary excerpts, pieces of a secret chronicle - which together tell the story of two lovers caught up in a dangerous and controversial revolutionary movement which attempted to do away with the two-tiered city of Venice: Leonardo da Vinci's architectural dream to segregate the rich and the poor described in his Notebooks and realised in this novel. At the centre of the narrative are two written confessions, one by a young girl from an aristocratic family - Loredana Loredan Contarini - who writes of her disastrous marriage to a sadomasochistic tyrant and her subsequent involvement with a revolutionary Friar - himself the second confessor. As both struggle to tell their tales and confess their sins, we are shown around the city of Venice as it might have been in the sixteenth-century and given pieces of a narrative which together form an explosive whole.
