anne rice brings to life the exquisite and otherworldly society of the eighteenthcentury castrati the delicate and alluring male sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices brought them the adulation of the royal courts and grand opera houses of europe men who lived as idols concealing their pain as they were adored as angels yet shunned as halfmenas we are drawn into their dark and luminous story as the crowds of venetians neopolitans and romans noblemen and peasants musicians prelates princes saints and intriguers swirl around them anne rice brings us into the sweep of eighteenthcentury italian life into the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of venice the wild frivolity of naples and the magnetic terror of its shadow vesuvius