The author begins this book by roaming literary Russia, but then strays into a maze of that country's sensual sounds, smells, fetishes and foods. Along the way, his prose takes in vodka, crows, Chekhov, bed-bugs, Tartars and tartar sauce, cures, beards, prisons, beer, toilets, Tolstoy's cook and his horse called Delirium. In the second part of the book, Buzzi wanders around a villa in Sicily, wondering about such things as matchboxes, tuna fish with red carnations in their mouths on market stalls, flies' stomachs, and plumbers' handshakes. But he soon becomes lost in a series of remembered journeys to an England of marmalade, to the Yucatan of the Mayan king Nemesio Xiu (whose name means herb, prince of herb), to Milan, Mexico, Rome, Belgrade, and back to Sicily.