Every hundred years, four kids from four cities must save the world.Rome, December 29.A mix-up with their reservations forces Harvey from New York, Mistral from Paris, and Sheng from Shanghai to share a room with the hotel owner’s daughter, Elettra. The four kids discover an amazing coincidence—they all have birthdays on February 29, Leap Day. That night, a strange man gives them a briefcase and asks them to take care of it until he returns. Soon afterward, the man is murdered.The kids open the briefcase. In it they find a series of clues that take them all over Rome, through dusty libraries and dark catacombs, in search of the elusive Ring of Fire, an ancient object so powerful that legend says even a Roman emperor couldn’t control it.In the first book of the Century quartet, Italian author P. D. Baccalario begins a mystery that will take four cities and four extraordinary kids to solve.
P. D. Baccalario was born in Acqui Terme, a beautiful little town in Piedmont, Italy. He started writing very short stories in high school during math classes. he gave his stories to his classmates and then they started sharing it with others in the class. Then, he discovered he had readers in other classes, and he kept on writing short stories, learning to write very quickly and to always choose surprising endings so that the other kids would come back and ask for the sequel.
Baccalario wrote his first novel, La Strada del Guerriero (The Road Warrior), in 15 days, and sent it to the Battello a Vapore Prize (Steamboat Prize), which it won. He wrote it under his neighbor's name because he was shy and only 23 years old at the time. The judges were convinced that the author of that book was an old and wise philosopher!
P. D. currently lives in Milan
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