Santa Ilario — F. Marion Crawford / Francis Marion Crawford

With a cosmopolitan education (in Italy, America, England, and Germany) and extensively traveled (including a stint in India as a newspaper editor), Crawford was the living embodiment, for many, of the late 19th-century genteel tradition.

His wide range as a traveler has contributed doubtless to another characteristic quality: his strength in unexcelled portraits of odd characters and his magical skill in seeming to make his readers witnesses of the spectacles.

Saracinesca is the first novel of his Roman tetralogy, the lush and evocative novels of Italian life and character which form the core of his oeuvre. It chronicles the shifting fortunes of a princely house against a panoramic background of Roman society in the later nineteenth-century. Saracinesca and its sequel Sant' Ilario are romances of passion and jealousy, featuring feuds, duels, suicides, and reconciliation. The third title in the series, Don Orsino, exposes the corruptions of Italian financial life; and Corleone, published much later, is a Sicilian episode that brings the Saracinesca into contact with the Mafia.