Claudio Bucchi

This series of five books recounts the tales of the five homosexual men who, over the course of several centuries inhabited the same small mediaeval house in the town of Cannes on the French Riviera. Although the five main characters are all homosexual, the stories are completely universal in nature, dealing with themes that can pertain to any person. The whole series is set on a dark, rather Gothicky stage.

The main themes of this second book, which begins in 1853, are unrequited love and mass hysteria.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, when numerous Italians, most especially from the Piedmont, move to Cannes for work, two impoverished young men from a tiny mountain village in that region, who are both cousins and best mates, and of whom one is secretly in love with the other, relocate there to seek their fortunes as well. At the same time, a malicious young woman from the north of France settles almost directly across from where they end up housed, and the two boys unintentionally end up entangled in the web she has created.