This novel (English: The Hound of Florence) is best known today for partly inspiring (and even mentioned in) the 1959 Walt Disney Pictures film, The Shaggy Dog. It is an adventure story for young readers, set in early eighteenth-century Austria and Italy. The adolescent Lukas Grassi has lost his parents and lives in Vienna in great poverty, longs for his native Italy, and would like to study art in Florence. By magic, his wish is granted, but every other day he must take the form of a dog, Kambyses, that belongs to the Archduke Ludwig; and alternating daily between human and canine form, he travels from Vienna to Florence along with the Archduke's troops, and there has to lead a unique double life. This is the only book of Salten in which supernatural elements occur, and they may show influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann.