Beyond San Sèrvolo's Gardens

<p>Can love fundamentally change people? Can it cure mental illness?</p><p>Venice 1967.</p><p>The novel tells the disturbing love story of Stefano Politano a robber from Italy and Ida Johnson an English teacher from America.</p><p>The suicide of a doctor at the San Sèrvolo asylum for the mentally ill triggers a series of events that lead to Stefano a patient there telling his story to his only surviving girlfriend - Olga.</p><p>It is a story that changed the lives of everyone around them metamorphosed Stefano and ended with several tragedies.</p><p>It is a tumultuous and passionate story that is tragic and heart breaking. It is a story of two extremes: a poor orphaned young man turned criminal and the spoiled daughter of an ambassador an English teacher - two people from two very different worlds but with common threads.</p><p>It is a story that shows the rise and fall of a man depending on his relationship with the person he loves.</p><p>It is a story about mental illness suicide unrelenting illness abuse forbidden love a world in which one of humanity's most beautiful and tragic love stories takes place.</p><p>It is a different kind of love born in a world troubled by riots and economic hardship reborn in a mental asylum that has become a stain of shame on the Italian government unable to treat the pellagra.</p>