a (whose second act ends with the murder of a city official in Napoleonic-era Rome???s equivalent of City Hall, the Palazzo Farnese); Manon Lescaut, which Mary Ann and I missed because one or the other of us was spilling blood at City Hall, is also a Puccini product, and Puccini is a composer who has an unwholesome preoccupation with the morbid: murder by strangulation (Il tabarro), torture (Tosca