A young Filipino comes home from Europe with a school to build, and finds the friars and the civil guard have their own use for a man with ideas. Rizal published Noli me tángere in Berlin in 1887; it was banned in the islands, and nine years later he was shot on the Luneta for having written it. This is the abridged English version of 1900, which is how the book first reached America. Sixty plates of gardens, city views and Spanish light by painters including Sorolla and Fortuny Marsal accompany the novel, their Mediterranean warmth echoing the lost world of Rizal's Manila.