A small Italian town is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an opera company to perform a new work by a local composer, the first theatrical performance in the town in thirty-eight and three-quarter years. The presence of the singers leads to a flare-up of the smouldering conflict between the liberal faction of professionals and veterans of Garibaldi's campaigns, headed by Advocate Belotti, and the conservative, clerical faction of small traders, headed by the irascible and combative priest Don Taddeo. But it also exposes a bewildering number of personal lusts, greeds, jealousies and revenge-struggles within the community.

Mann explicitly structures the book like an opera, with big opening and closing choruses as the singers arrive on the mail-coach and leave again, a spectacular sustained centre-piece taking us through the chaos both front-of-house and backstage during the tumultuous premiere of The poor Tonietta, and then two more scenes with the entire cast onstage: a Meistersinger-style riot in the main square and the night-time burning-down of Café Progress, which transforms seamlessly to Don Taddeo's big scene during mass in the cathedral. In between there are any number of romantic trysts in gardens and dark alleys, interspersed with jolly café conversation scenes.

There is a ludicrously oversized cast of named characters for a book of this length (around 400 pages), and Mann has fun "burying" characters who will later become important, slipping them in to play insignificant roles in the crowded ensemble scenes. Another very important part of his technique is to present a lot of crucial plot information to us only as gossip, so that we are never entirely sure who is sleeping with whom. But neither are any of the characters in the book, and a lot of actions people take turn out to have been based on false information.

Fun in detail, a lively evocation of Italian small-town life, but maybe a bit frustrating when you try to make something out of it as a complete novel. ( )