Synopsis

It's 1916, the Great War is raging, and Clementina has her own personal battle to fight. Before dying, her husband Cesare made her promise to ensure their children's success, as he would have done. So Clementina leaves Rome with Filippo, Emira, and Francesco, and returns to live in the family home in Lecce with her two sisters, Maria and Anna, bound together by an absolute bond. It is Germain, a calm and visionary French professor, who suggests the way to keep her promise: if she was the one who oversaw Filippo's education, why not help other children with their studies as well? And not as an act of charity, but for work? When, overcoming her own resistance and that of her time, Clementina decides to accept her first students, she doesn't imagine that she will teach for over twenty years and will establish a full-fledged school in her home. Above all, she doesn't imagine that in trying to help her children succeed, she will end up succeeding herself. Long ago, Clementina was a girl who wrote stories, a teenager who wanted to read and study and who, according to her father, "would have made a perfect boy," and then a young wife of few words and many thoughts, capable of earning a room of her own in the marital home. But her years in Rome were also years of great pain. Only by perfecting her teaching method, empirical and anything but conventional, will Clementina rediscover the part of herself she had lost. Meanwhile, the history of the early twentieth century—fascism, the war—is bearing down on her, sometimes violently, more often like background noise. While she continues to make her small, very domestic revolution.