While meditatively travelling around the countryside, a painter happens upon the Zafer hermitage, a sort of inn for spiritual retreats. These are led by Don Gaetano, a cultivated and intellectual priest who, along with the artist, is the chief figure in this story. The artist, curious about the place, decides to stay there for a few days. His stay coincides with the arrival of a group of politicians gathered for a session of spiritual exercises and he becomes a witness to what ought to be a period of self-recollection, a turning away from the mundane world towards God and oneself, but actually turns into a grim scenario in which a series of murders takes place.


These happenings deeply shake the order, bringing into their peaceful haven the dynamics of the wider world, of political power and money, which attracts diverse observations and comments from both priest and painter. Thus two distinct psychological dimensions, the creative and the religious, confront each other in debate in the presence of a political world which emerges here as having no spiritual dimension at all, being occupied with empty, instant gratification.


Sciascia focuses on an area which Italian literature has avoided: the confrontation between the secular intellectual and Christianity. Don Gaetano’s words prophetically warn against the mingling of the Church and political power while the artist admits to an existential and ideological unease which finds no answers. Altogether the book, read in the light of the present moral and political ruin of Italy through corruption, rings out as an alarming prediction, a case of literary clairvoyance that makes the novel seem as if written precisely for today.

‘«You — excuse me — you have no idea what these church-and-hearth people are capable of, these people with their missals in hand who say they love their neighbour as themselves... In just two months — and I can’t wait to see the day — I will have completed thirty years of service with the police. Well, the most ferocious crimes I’ve come across — the most rationally planned and best camouflaged, and also the maddest and most easily detectable — have been committed by men and women whose knees were swollen like this» — his hand modelled a plump, rounded loaf — «from kneeling at altar rails and confessional gratings... Some, of course, were sex crimes. But the greatest part, believe me, were committed for money. And most always for money to be inherited from someone’s nearest and dearest.»’ pp104-105