Content Warning: This novel discusses suicide and abuse.

The novel opens with an unnamed narrator who is traveling abroad, who describes an abandoned castle in Sicily. The narrator reflects on how the passage of time has turned the once-grand castle to a ruin, just as time and death will claim all who live. During these reflections, the narrator meets a friar who offers access to a manuscript relating the history of the castle’s inhabitants, the Mazzini family, which the narrator explains has now been reconstituted into the story told in the novel.

The first chapter provides exposition about events that occurred prior to the start of the novel's main plot and establishes the setting as a castle in Sicily owned by Ferdinand, the fifth Marquis de Mazzini, near the end of the 16th century. The marquis was once married to Louisa Bernini, known for her sweet nature, and they had three children together: Ferdinand, Julia, and Emilia. However, the marquis's “unkindness and neglect put a period to” his wife's life (3). The marquis then married the beautiful and manipulative Maria de Vellorno, and the couple moved to Naples, bringing only the marquis's son and leaving his two daughters behind in Mazzini.