Grieving the death of her mother,19 year old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to stay with friends at their home in Tuscany.Lucy has her own reasons for agreeing to travel to the Villa Grayson:Niccolo Donati captured her heart four years ago,her first love,a memory she has cherished even though the letters have stopped coming,she would dearly love to see him again.And she wishes to solve the riddle found in her mother's diary-Sara was a free spirit eager for all kinds of experience and shy of responsibility and her record of times past casts a shadow that hasn't faded.Lucy's nubile presence stirs up the torpid Italian summer lives of all those at the villa.Only the dying and old remember the passion and pain of youth with sensitivity equal to Lucy's.By the time she solves her own riddles,the lives of those who summer at the Villa Grayson will never be quite the same again.