Plot: Within the musky stone walls of Santa Chiara's 17th-century convent prison in Bobbio, Benedetta the nun, faces silently, yet, heroically a gallery of relentlessly pious inquisitors led by Cacciapuoti, the head priest. In the eyes of her persecutors, Sister Benedetta is undoubtedly a sinner and a cunning witch who skilfully tempted into an affair her confessor, the God-fearing Don Fabrizio, and later on, bewitched him to commit suicide while riddled with guilt and remorse. Now, his twin brother, the seasoned man-at-arms Federico Mai, driven by the certainty that the only way to give Don Fabrizio peace and to avoid a burial in the unholy grounds of the donkey cemetery is to extract by all means a solid confession from the cursed nun, arrives at the prison to participate in the trials of water and fire. Presently and centuries later, the abandoned, crumbling and derelict Santa Chiara's convent prison is now on sale over the internet and a not-to-be-missed opportunity for profit for the billionaire Russian investor Ivan Rikalkov. By his side is the local inspector from the regional Department of State Property and Tax, Federico Mai, however, upstairs, in the narrow, dimly lit former cloisters, secretly resides for the past eight years the cultivated night owl, Count Basta. What could link the cryptic Count who balances between the past and the present, the darkness and the light, with Bobbio's rich history?
Alternative Plot: Walls are torn down between the past and present as two stories from a convent are told simultaneously; a nun is accused of being bedfellows with Satan, and a wealthy Russian attempts to purchase the convent where she was eventually imprisoned.
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