This fine autobiographical novel by the poet-writer Emilio Paolo Taormina is distinguished by a special feature: the author does not hide his venerable age, well aware that, after him, there will be hardly anyone left of those who have crossed the last century with a load of memories and people who have gone down in history.... One of these people is certainly Raniero Alliata di Pietratagliata, the Prince-wizard who lived ensconced in a splendid villa-castle dedicating his entire life to his beloved collections of insects and beetles. Or Enrico Ragusa, former owner of the famous "Alla Trinacria" hotel opposite the port and later of the legendary "Grand Hotel des Palmes", a place evoking charm and luxury... Enrico Ragusa himself had passed on to Prince Raniero his passion for entomology, a science cultivated by both of them at a scientific level. And then there was Elvira des Palmes (1875-1961), the natural daughter of Enrico Ragusa, another historical figure who, with this book, Emilio Paolo Taormina also consecrates to literature.

Well, Elvira was the author's paternal grandmother, with whom he had an intense relationship of affection and complicity in his adolescent years (and even earlier), even though he guessed at a dark side of her that stubbornly eluded all investigation, as if she were "an impregnable fortress"...

Who was Elvira really? What was the mystery of her birth? For many years the author had been searching for an answer in some women who had been close to him in his childhood and adolescence, but in the end he had been disappointed... until this tormented search for her birthplace led to an unpredictable epilogue and materialised in the figure of a Russian countess who had arrived in Palermo from afar, a guest at the Hotel Trinacria: her daughter, many years later, we would find as a young girl at the Grand Hotel des Palmes, no one knew her name, she was known by everyone as "Elvira des Palmes...".

An intriguing story, enthralling for the affective and emotional pathos that the author pours into this novel, a reality lived, even painfully, in the first person ...

This is the historical context, the background is that of the Belle Époque, the years between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Palermo, the European capital of Art Nouveau, the city of luxurious hotels and the first generation of great hoteliers, attracted illustrious names and aristocrats from all over Europe (Giulia Sommariva).