 
 
 
|
Italy, 1943. The ocher-walled town of Nemi, perched high on a hill south of Rome, looks serenely down on the crater lake where, 2000 years before, the Roman emperor Caligula sailed his floating palaces to the Temple of Diana. Just a few years before the war, the ships, sunk after Caligula's death, were miraculously recovered, to await a fate that will forever remain a mystery.
Paolo, the curator of the museum in which the ships are held, now struggles to protect these treasures from Allied bombs and the depredations of the Germans in a world where the struggle for simple survival makes such efforts seem irrelevant. He watches with disquiet as the German occupation brings together Rosanna, his daughter, whose innocence is brutalized by the horrors of the war, and Klaus, a German officer, whose high ideals and love for Rosanna cause him soul-wrenching conflicts of loyalty. Love? Or duty?
Against the backdrop of war-torn Italy, The Mirror of Diana tells the story of Klaus and Rosanna’s secret love and of one of the war’s great unsolved mysteries: why were the fabulous ships of Caligula reduced to ashes? The answer may have been foretold in the legend sculpted on the mirror of Diana.
|
