Miranda wondered why the presence chose certain women, sought them out it seemed, inspired them but then disappeared. She imagined she knew the answer. The duchess came here, home, to Amalfi, and beckoned those women, those special women, to follow, but none ever did. None had trailed after her like mariners chasing the siren’s call, perhaps because none had ever heard her aright—until now.

On the way to the Sorrento peninsula, Miranda Amendola and her sister Tanya pass through Rome where an ancient musician and an appealing young man open new doorways into the brave new world of Amalfi, called by some the heartbroken land.

Amalfi, perhaps the most beautiful city on the world’s most beautiful coastline, is a storied place. Here Odysseus tied himself to his ship’s mast to hear the Sirens sing. Here Orpheus competed with the gods of music. And here, in 1512, Giovanna d’Aragona, the famous duchess of Malfi, sacrificed herself to save her dignity and her love—and disappeared without a trace. Only her celebrated, much-debated portrait, by Raphael, hints at her secret life and untimely death.

From the antiquity of the Roman nights to the ruined stones of the Castello di Scalella, where Giovanna was murdered, Miranda chases the legend of the duchess—a woman, according to local lore, whose five-hundred-year-old ghost still wanders the hills, weeping for love.

Hoping to find release from her own haunted past, Miranda begins writing the biography of the legendary duchess. All goes well until papers begin appearing mysteriously in Miranda’s bedroom as she sleeps: five-hundred-year-old, ancient papers—a translation into Italian of Miranda’s work. But it is more than mere translation. It revises her writing, recreates her ideas, and Miranda realizes that her biography is gradually becoming a five-hundred-years-dead autobiography.

The translation tells the story of heartbreak and sacrifice, of mistakes in love and of the yearning to make them right again. It tells a tale hauntingly familiar—strikingly similar to Miranda’s own past and ghostly dreams.

In THE ITALIAN TRANSLATION the world of the Costiera Amalfitana comes to life—from the rich concert music of Ravello to the azure blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea—and a woman discovers the single most important truth in life: love never dies.