New Einaudi edition, originally published by Rizzoli in 1998.

"Every line he etches on the paper seems to him to be a step toward her: and at the end, when he sets down the silver point and closes the ink bottle, and she slumps exhaustedly on the scanno and closes her eyes, he smiles-because he knows he has, today, possessed her." An interlocking novel, La camera di Baltus weaves together in a perfect multiplication of mirrors three stories that are dangerously similar, linked by a mysterious thread that spans the centuries: that of Master Henry, a painter of the late fifteenth century, author of the frescoes in the room that gives the novel its title, on the tower of the castle of Bastia del Garbo; that of Baltus, a Napoleonic officer with a Stendhal charm, who lives out his last hours in the very room of the tower that takes its name from him; that, finally, of Arsenio Ventura, the contemporary critic called upon to pass judgment on the now corroded but beautiful and enigmatic frescoes, which by the light of a lamp are revived and transformed into a tale of love and war, women and men, freedom and loneliness. This is how an initiatory journey through time and space comes to life, where past and present are contrasted in a combinatorial game of great metaphorical richness and stylistic variety.