Ten stories about artist’s passionate loves set in evocative places. Human bonds and the “bond of the Muse”, as Dante put it, which in these pages become one. Through a clear and appealing narrative, Elena Stancanelli reconstructs the romantic geographies of some of the twentieth century’s greatest authors and artists.

And so we come across Truman Capote and Jack Dunphy in Taormina, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in Los Angeles, the brother and sister Erika and Karl Mann traveling the world with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Romain Gary and Jean Seberg at Puerto de Andratx, and Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen on the Greek island of Hydra. And again, discovering Graham Greene’s passion for Catherine Walston that inspired “The End of the Affair”, and that between Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas. And then the loves of Edith Piaf and the boxer Marcel Cerdan, Virginia Bourbon del Monte, the widow of Edoardo Agnelli, and Curzio Malaparte in Versilia, the poet Dylan Thomas and the writer and critic Pearl Kazin against the backdrop of Manhattan in the fifties.

Completing and enriching this multifaceted world map of the heart are the illustrations by the multimedia artist Marina Sagona.