Maria Canossa
The Lufthansa plane touched down on the darkened landing strip in Rome and Maria Canossa breathed a sigh of relief.  She was home...away from Berlin and nine years of a disastrous marriage...back to the refuge of the beautiful city of her childhood.  But it was 1943, and the tanks and antiaircraft guns silhouetted against the moonlit sky were a grim reminder that Rome was a city tensed for catastrophe, not the happy, carefree place where she grew up.  Nothing seemed the same.  And for Maria, nothing would ever be the same again.  Her journey home had carried her into a world of tangled intrigue.  It was a world from which there could be no retreat, for here she had found love...a love so passionate, so compelling, it would transcend the harrowing reality of the war that surrounded it.