Stealing Beauty

For 20 years, many visitors have come to the villa on an Italian hilltop owned by an English artist. Lucy, a 19-year-old American, was last there four years ago and wants to meet up again with the young Italian who kissed her and corresponded for a while. She has brought the diary of her late mother, filled with enigmatic poems that suggest Lucy was conceived on that hilltop. Lucy wants to find out if Daddy is the Italian war correspondent who wrote to her mother for 20 years. Then again Daddy could be the dying English playwright in residence, or the artist who uses a chainsaw on tree trunks for his sculptures. The three, of course, have no idea that Lucy is there to solve a mystery. They, the artist's wife and daughter, and the daughter's American lover are most intrigued by Lucy's virginity.