As a tsunami in South-East Asia kills three hundred thousand and Pope John Paul II lies dying, the lives of eight people in Rome are transformed by a Croatian housekeeper named Dubravka, who was betrayed in love and later witness to a miracle at the site of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The stories of the North Americans and Italians she encounters interconnect and alternate with key episodes from Dubravka's life, as she struggles to resolve her personal concerns as well as the contradictions in her Catholic faith while working at a pensione in Rome's Campo de' Fiori, in the shadow of the statue of the martyred visionary Giordano Bruno.