A Beautiful Bucket of Bones - Tapa dura

It was the end of summer in 2006, five years after the best and worst week of Cara Dolorina's life. Her tour of Italy was confirmed; it would take her to some of the most exquisite regions in the world and introduce her to fifty men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. The price was a nonrefundable six thousand dollars, about four months worth of tips from her family's North Beach restaurant. Though scared and sentimental, Cara knew she had no choice but to seek a new way to live. She needed to take a vacation. She needed to make a friend. She needed to find a meaning for her beloved little pain. But first she had to fly from San Francisco to Rome, a journey far more terrifying than the years she spent in solitude. The trip would be a trial, a puzzle for her faith. With courage, wisdom and determination, she would pass and be rewarded with fate and a fresh beginning. With fear, she would fail and endure a tragic death.

In the hideous and the horrifying, somehow there is beauty.