The novel opens with the Jubilee of 1900 in Rome, at the height of the dispute between the Vatican and the Italian State over the temporal power of the Church. This context is intertwined with the social demands of the era, animated by a Christian socialism that Caine himself was steeped in. Davide Rossi is a Left-wing deputy who fights for the people and opposes a corrupt prime minister, who will try to prevent the culmination of the love story between Rossi and Donna Roma Volonna.
Caine spent a long time in Rome, visiting every place depicted in the novel; his descriptions of Regina Coeli, the Vatican and its ceremonies, the city's fashionable places and its squares teeming with ordinary people, convey the atmosphere of the time. The book is imbued with a religious sense of life and the characters, even the most abject ones, are described compassionately, like a true investigator of the human soul. Reading this text more than a century after its release, one cannot help but be struck by the author's visionary ability: he foresaw for Italy, albeit in terms of "fictional politics", the dictatorship, the abdication of the monarchy, and the birth of the Republic, forty years in advance.
Thomas Henry Hall Caine (1853-1931) wrote about fifteen novels, veritable best-sellers, which earned him the title of "Sir" in 1917. The Manxman of 1894 is the most well-known of his works, thanks to A. Hitchcock's film adaptation in 1929. The Christian (1897) was the first book to sell a million copies in England. Pietro Mascagni set the theatrical version of The Eternal City to music in 1902.
