Dry heat has its own exhaustion, its own madness, the visiting academics in James Sturz s Sasso were always going to be outsiders in the closed-in South Italian society of Mancanzano, but the logic of events and the climate leads them to terrible conclusions. Mancanzano is a town whose inhabitants used to live in caves in the volcanic rock that surrounds it, and still use powdered rock to cool off or stave off hunger. A series of dead teenage couples are found intertwined in caves with frescoes