An editor at a Portuguese publishing house, Raimundo Silva, undertakes to rewrite a crucial episode in Portuguese history as a romantic saga, with the amorous encouragement of his supervisor.

In eighteenth-century Portugal, fifty thousand laborers carry stones on their backs across mountains to build the king’s convent, a heretical priest devises a magic flying machine–the Passarola–and two lovers’ dream…

Senhor Jose is a minor official in a registry office, with a passion for reconstructing people’s lives from the data in archive documents. One woman’s file is particularly intriguing. She…