On the hottest day of one of the hottest summers anyone has ever known, young journalist Federico Desideri is sent on an apparently routine assignment; to snatch an interview with Italy's latest Oscar winning film director. But in Rome. Far from the comforts of his native Milan. When the director turns out to be elusive, and the Romans as rough as their reputation, Federico falls in with Barry Volpicelli, the rumoured inspiration behind the winning movie's lead character - a seductive, fast-talking, America-obsessed rogue, and instead of finding his interviewee, he finds himself in Paradiso-Barry's crumbling country estate on the Lazio coast, with an eccentric cast of inhabitants who seem frozen in time. Alan Bennett meets Fellini at a shabby, Italian White Lotus in this novel which is a satirical bildungsroman through the nature of illusion, escapism and the enduring myth of the Eternal City. As Federico navigates the absurdities, passions, and dangers of this apparent paradise, it starts to look more and more like purgatory, and he begins to question how he can find his way out.