This novel centers on the erotic poetry the Roman poet Catullus wrote to a notoriously heartless woman named Clodia in c.63 B.C. Years later, in the 15th century, the poems turn up in Venice, where a German printer named Wendolin von Speyer publishes them--and they set into a motion a sequence of events that involve secret loves, witchcraft, marital troubles, and the downfall of a Clodia-like woman.