"My name is Alessandro, and I have been alive for more than eight hundred years." Born in Venice in the Twelfth Century, Alessandro finds himself storming the gates of Constantinople with the Crusades-only to be seriously wounded in the attack and left for dead. Or at least he should have been dead. Miraculously coaxed back to health by a woman possessing knowledge of ancient healing powers, Alessandro slowly understands that somehow, as his friends and lovers become older with the passage of time, his face remains as unmarred as it was the day he awoke from his injuries. Alessandro must travel from destination to destination, each time making a new place his home for a few years and leaving before his secret is discovered. The Second Diary records Alessandro's departure from plague-ravaged Venice to travel many years in Spain and Portugal at the time the Iberian provinces were moving toward nationhood. He purchases a wine estate in the Chianti Valley in lower Tuscany but later leaves to follow Marco Polo's route to Cathay. He welcomes the Fifteenth Century while in the South Seas on a giant dragonship of the Ming Dynasty.