After the international success of L’architettrice, Melania Mazzucco discovers and gives life to a new, unforgettable female character. 

In her many lives, Diana Karenne has been everything: mysterious foreigner, femme fatale, gypsy, singer, film entrepreneur, spy, nun torn from the convent, saint, countess, queen, czarina. Before time erased all memory of her, between 1916 and 1919 she was above all the greatest diva of Italian silent cinema. But not only that. She wrote the subjects of her films herself, began directing them, becoming one of the first female film directors in history, and from a certain point on produced them as an entrepreneur. Restless and elusive, Diana juggles aristocrats, diplomats, producers of bandit fame, and actors on the prowl, always pursued by suspicion of being a spy. She moves from Rome to Turin, from Milan to Naples to Genoa. She is the first to believe the lies she tells, to the point of creating an alternate reality, and a new woman: Diana Karenne, indeed. After the war, however, the Italian film industry went into crisis, and in 1921 Diana moved to Paris and then to Berlin. There are exiles from Bolshevik Russia, and her former life and origins force her to come to terms with her identity. Unlike other silent film stars, it is not so much the transition to sound that ends her acting career, but the irresistible desire to disappear, to become yet another woman. She seemed destined for oblivion, Diana Karenne, but in this novel, born like her most memorable achievements from a compelling, years-long investigation, Melania Mazzucco restores her to us in all her vital contemporaneity.