There was a family that took on the world. A family that conquered everything. A family that became legends. Its story is also the story of Favignana. A beautiful novel tells its story written by a writer from Trapani.

From the moment they disembarked in Palermo from Bagnara Calabra in 1799, the Florios looked ahead, restless and ambitious, determined to get higher than everyone else, to be the richest, the most powerful. They really succeeded: in a short time, the brothers Paolo and Ignazio made their spice shop the best in the city, then they started the sulphur trade, bought houses and land from the flamboyant Palermitan nobles, created their own shipping company... And when Vincenzo, Paolo's son, took over Casa Florio, their unstoppable success continued: In the Florio cellars, a poor man's wine - marsala - was transformed into a nectar worthy of a king's table; in Favignana, a revolutionary method for preserving tuna - in oil and in cans - relaunched its consumption throughout Europe... Meanwhile Palermo observed the Florios' expansion, their pride involved envy and contempt: those successful men remained "foreigners", "porters" whose "blood smelt of sweat". Palermo did not know that it was precisely a burning desire for social redemption that lay at the heart of the Florios' ambition and marks their lives; the men of this family were exceptional individuals but also fragile and needed equally exceptional women at their side: like Giuseppina, Paolo's wife, who sacrifices everything - including love - for the stability of the family, or Giulia, the young Milanese woman who enters Vincenzo's life like a vortex and becomes his safe harbour, an unassailable rock.

Interweaving the path of the Florios' commercial and social rise with their tumultuous private affairs, against the backdrop of the most turbulent years of Italian history - from the uprisings of 1818 to Garibaldi's landing in Sicily - Stefania Auci unravels a family saga of incredible strength, so alive and pulsating that it seems contemporary.