Ippolita and Lucrezia are mother and daughter in a noble Naples vice-royal family.

Ippolita loves, and sees her feelings returned by, the preceptor of the offspring (a priest who finds it hard to recognize himself in the values of the Roman Church and is captivated by Giordano Bruno’s doctrine), while her daughter Lucrezia surrenders to the passion of a young and celebrated “canterino”, a singer who, thanks to his art, gets invited to palaces and courts throughout Europe.

The young singer is of humble origin, and, even worse, is a castrato.

The setting for the story is a Baroque Naples with its rituals, its perverse certainties and its fatal obsessions, and the mountain village where the protagonists seek escape when the plague explodes in the city.

The two women will have to pay a high price for rebelling and redeeming, yet this way they will be able to experience a full and unsuspected happiness, made even more exciting by the discovery that wanting to master oneself is not a sin - but a right.