The Florentine Renaissance came to a brutal end with the fundamentalist politics of Savonarola. The experiment of The New Jerusalem ended in hell andTommaso de’ Maffei fled to England. This final part of the trilogy is set in 1506, when Tommaso returns to Italy in the company of Erasmus. On the way, he recounts the story of those turbulent years. Only on his return to Florence does he begin  to make sense of what happened and to learn from it.