Asolo, Italy, March 1945. Livia Mazzion, the attractive wife of a top ministry official, slips into the car of lawyer Ugo Oggiano, Livia's admirer and her husband's informant. Livia must reach Venice and her lover Helmut Schultz, a Wermacht lieutenant as beautiful and cursed as a pagan god, with whom she is having a burning love affair. Throughout the journey, she relives the high points of her devastating sexual abandonment gone adrift, one that has shattered her life and destiny, swallowing her up in the ruinous vortex of a sybaritic and bituminous Venice. In the midst of the war's final months, the city is teeming with traffickers, officials, nabobs, military brass, sharks, and adventurers of all stripes. However, a surprise awaits Livia upon her arrival in Venice, a surprise in which the heroes' personal defeats intertwine with those public, as historical and political events now seek to settle accounts.
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