La Certosa di Parma

The Charterhouse of Parma (French: La Chartreuse de Parme) is a novel by Stendhal published in 1839. Telling the story of an Italian nobleman in the Napoleonic era and later, it was admired by Balzac, Tolstoy, André Gide, di Lampedusa and Henry James. It was inspired by an inauthentic Italian account of the dissolute youth of Alessandro Farnese. The novel has been adapted for opera, film and television. The title refers to a Carthusian monastery, which is only mentioned on the last page of the novel and does not figure significantly in the plot.