Seminar on Youth is an account of the adventures of a young peasant from northern Italy who becomes a homosexual prostitute in Milan and Paris. For money or company he pursues relationships, most memorably with an insecure French girl, and through her, with her circle of bourgeois women friends.
11 September 1683, Rome. The citizens of the city wait anxiously for the outcome of the battle of Vienna as Ottoman forces lay siege to the defenders of Catholic Europe. Meanwhile, a suspected outbreak of plague causes a famous tavern to be placed under quarantine. While detained there, French spy Atto Melani discovers a secret network of passages under the city. They lead him into the Roman underworld and the startling discovery of a plot to assassinate the pope and a plan to use the plague as a weapon of mass destruction in the battle between Islam and the West…