Every house has a story to tell. Laura Horton doesn’t know if the rumours about Leon Murphy are true, but she keeps her distance anyway. It’s hard enough being the girl from the haunted house. However, Laura soon finds she has more in common with Leon than she first thought. They are both outsiders. They both have secrets. And they are both drawn to the mystery hidden within the walls of the Visconti House. As Laura begins to piece together the fragments of the puzzle, she and Leon take an unexpected journey into the past, one that will change their lives – and open their hearts – forever.

Since the beginning, much of Italian cinema has been sustained by transforming literature into moving images. This tradition of literary adaptation continues today, challenging artistic form and practice by pressuring the boundaries that traditionally separate film from its sister arts. In the twentieth century, director Luchino Visconti is a keystone figure in Italy's evolving art of adaptation. From the tumultuous years of Fascism and postwar Neorealism, through the blockbuster decade of the 1960s, into the arthouse masterpieces of the 1970s, Visconti's adaptations marked a distinct pathway of the Italian cinematic imagination. Luchino Visconti and the Alchemy of Adaptation examines these films together with their literary antecedents. Moving past strict book-to-film comparisons, it ponders how literary texts encounter and interact with a history of cultural and cinematic forms, genres, and traditions. Matching the major critical concerns of the postwar period (realism, political filmmaking, cinematic modernism) with more recent notions of adaptation and intermediality, this book reviews how one of Italy's greatest directors mined literary ore for cinematic inspiration.

Australian fourteen-year-old Laura Horton has always been an outsider, more interested in writing, drawing, or spending time with her free-spirited family than in her fellow teens, but she is drawn to Leon, a new student, as together they explore the mysteries of her eccentric old house.