Based on a true story and set in a community of immigrants living, working, and loving on the margins of French society, the story follows the eponymous Italian migrant, whose tempestuous affairs with two women, the faithful Marie and the flirtatious Josefa, unleash a wave of tragedy.

In New York City in the 1870s, a rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere, but these people have been studying it since they were born. In this elegant milieu, marriages, like treaties between nations, exist to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth; scions of old and rich families understand that their personal desires have...