Rome 1967. Carlo Baldi is a linguistics researcher specialised in deciphering ancient texts. He is in the midst of analysing Marsilio Ficino's last letters to his friend Vespucci, when suddenly a parchment emerges from a crack in his shabby building in Via del Tritone. On it are depicted islands and a mysterious monkish phrase turns out to be strangely assonant to a Ficino expression used in the epistolary. Turning to a keen antiquarian to have it examined, Piero, Carlo discovers the next day that the man has been stabbed, so he tries to dispose of the parchment before leaving for Oxford. There a study of the Symposium awaits him, aimed at identifying between the lines the location of an alleged Templar network of Eleusinian origin. But the curse of the parchment seems to reach him there too, in an increasingly enigmatic and gloomy London, where the frantic search for truth takes on a meaning quite different from archaeology.