Agnes of Sorrento

A convent girl in fifteenth-century Sorrento, an outlawed young nobleman, and Savonarola preaching in Florence while the Borgias hold Rome. Stowe wrote it after traveling in Italy, ten years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, as the Civil War began at home, and used the same instrument on a different subject: what a church is for when the men running it have stopped believing. Sixty plates of Venetian canals and cloisters by Canaletto and Guardi carry the story's church-and-sea atmosphere across four centuries of painting.