Rome

Rome, the 1890s. A young French priest arrives in the Eternal City carrying a single suitcase - and a manuscript that could end his career.

Abbé Pierre Froment has written a book daring to imagine a Catholic Church reconciled with modern science, democracy, and the poor. Summoned to Rome to defend it before it can be condemned, he throws himself into a city he has only ever loved from afar: golden ruins and marble palaces, scheming cardinals and starving peasants, where every staircase seems to lead toward - or away from - the Pope.

He finds shelter with the Boccaneras, a princely family clinging to the wreckage of its former glory in a crumbling palazzo on the Via Giulia. Between the dying contessa's fierce pride, a volatile young heir's debts, and the silent, smoldering presence of a woman bound by an annulment case that drags through Rome's ecclesiastical courts, Pierre discovers a city built as much on secrets and old vendettas as on faith.

As he waits for an audience that keeps slipping out of reach, his certainties begin to crack. Rome does not merely resist his book - it rewrites his soul.

The first of two volumes completing Émile Zola's Rome, the second novel of his celebrated Three Cities trilogy - a sweeping, controversial portrait of the Church, the Eternal City, and one man's collision with both.