American architect Stourley Kracklite arrives in Rome, accompanied by his young pregnant wife, to organize an exhibition dedicated to the architect Etienne Louis Boullée, the subject of his expert connoisseurship. Several of Rome’s symbolic buildings, including the Pantheon, Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli and the Vittorio Emanuele II monument, as well as several of Boullée’s incompleted utopian projects, form the backdrop of the descending parabola of the protagonist, who’s obsessed with the terminal illness that has stricken his midsection.