In April 1953, attractive, 21-year-old Wilma Montesi went missing from her family home in Rome; when her body was found washed up on a neglected beach, the incident was attributed to either suicide or an accident. But as the author of Glamour shows in this history, as the police tried to close the case, darker rumors suggested that the death of this quiet, conservative girl was linked to a drug-fuelled orgy, involving some of the richest and most powerful men in Italy. By the 1950s, post–Mussolini Italy was in the process of successfully reinventing itself, but Montesi's death exposed a darker side of Roman life—a life of corruption, cover-ups and carnal pleasures.