Gaia Servadio is an Italian writer, long settled in Britain, who has retained a passionate relationship with her motherland and those who have expressed this in verse. The cast she has assembled has a spell-binding intensity, so that the reader twists between Byron and Dante, flickers between the imagery drawn by St Francis, Baudelaire and Milton, Gabriele D-Annunzio and Joseph Brodsky. Through her choices we see the two opposing natures of Italy, united by their differences.