56 pages • 1 hour read
From Sand and Ash
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, death by suicide, graphic violence, and death.
Prologue Summary: “24 March, 1944”
Angelo Bianco, a Catholic priest, is severely injured and stranded on the roadside near Rome. Needing to get to the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere to find Eva, Angelo begins walking, though he is in tremendous pain. He stops at a church he knows and drinks from the fountain while staring up at a statue of a saint. It reminds him of Saint George and the day he felt called to be a priest. Angelo has a prosthetic leg. As a child, on a school field trip to the Palazzo del Bargello, Father Sebastiano showed Angelo the statue of Saint George. Now, Angelo cries out to the unnamed statue in front of him for help.
Angelo recalls an old priest teaching him that Saint George was a Roman soldier who refused to bow to Roman gods. Saint George “defeated the dragon” by resisting fear and the temptation to conform. The priest asserted that George became “immortal” by facing death for his faith. Angelo arrives at Santa Cecilia near death, asking for Eva. Mother Francesca and Mario Sonnino carry him to Eva’s bed, but she isn’t there. The Germans took her three days ago.
The prologue closes with a letter dated March 24, 1944, from Batsheva Rosselli, confessing that she has been posing as Eva Bianco.
