Amazon.com description: Product Description: An Italian woman,married to an American, returns to Venice, her native area on the collapse of her marriage. The recent upheaval in her life is bringing her to come to term with something that happened at the Venice Lido the summer she was seventeen, where through naivete and vanity, she was the unwitting catalyst to a tragedy. The story moves between that distant summer and the present winter. And behind the story is Venice, the city of mask and illusions in all its misery and glory