Summary
A grizzled Italian showman, Giuseppe Franchini, drifts along the Ligurian littoral with only a pet bruin and a moon-eyed tot for company; one tempestuous dawn he dives into a slate-green swell to haul a half-drowned aristocrat ashore, only to be sucked seaward by a mocking riptide. Months later he trudges back, salt-caked and penniless, to find his wife in the grave, his child vanished with the very man he saved, and his bear the last breathing witness to a life gutted by capricious fate. Years roll like barrel hoops: Giuseppe and Bruno cross the Atlantic, stumble onto the manicured apiaries of the Vandergrift dynasty, are clapped in irons for honey theft, and are pitched into a gaudy American carnival of graft, yellow journalism, and suffragette fire. The grown heiress Adelaide—glowing, privileged, ignorant of her true paternity—befriends the weather-beaten rescuer, while her bruised bear languishes behind bars. To ransom his shaggy accomplice, Giuseppe croons Neapolitan ballads in a roadside dive run by a political kingpin who schemes to ruin Adelaide’s reformist fiancé. Armed with evidence inked in midnight oil and blood, Giuseppe confronts the perfumed corruption of the Gilded Age, then slips away into the twilight, gifting his daughter a future unburdened by the chiaroscuro of his own wrecked past.
Synopsis
Giuseppe Franchini lives with his little daughter Francesca and pet bear Bruno on the Italian coast. One day, Giuseppe sees a shipwrecked man offshore and swims to his rescue, but in doing so, he is carried out to sea. Upon his return, he finds that his wife has died of shock at the news of his drowning, and the stranger has taken away the little girl. Years later, Giuseppe travels to America with Bruno where they are arrested for invading an apiary on the Vandergrift estate. Giuseppe is befriended by Vandergrift's daughter Adelaide, but Bruno is sent to jail for his crimes. To pay Bruno's fine, Giuseppe takes a job in a roadhouse owned by John Slade. Here, he learns of Slade's plans to smear Adelaide's fiancé, Craig Winton, the reform candidate for mayor. Giuseppe presents proof of Slade's corruption to Adelaide, who turns it over to her father. When Giuseppe meets Vandergrift, he recognizes him as the man he rescued, but, realizing that Adelaide is happy in her life, he leaves town without letting her know that he is her real father.
