Gaia Servadio is an Italian writer, long settled in Britain, who has retained a passionate relationship with her motherland and those who have expressed this in verse. The cast she has assembled has a spell-binding intensity, so that the reader twists between Byron and Dante, flickers between the imagery drawn by St Francis, Baudelaire and Milton, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Joseph Brodsky. Through her choices we see the two opposing natures of Italy, united by their differences.