Synopsis

Andrea is walking the streets of New York, in the middle of the night, when he receives a phone call. He immediately recognizes Elettra's voice, even though he hasn't heard from her in ten years. She's the reason he ran away from Rome, his hometown, and now she's the one asking him to return... Andrea and Elettra met at twelve, the day she moved into the building in central Rome where Andrea grew up. Aside from their home address, they have nothing in common. He is the son of a shy and taciturn restaurateur and during the summers he works in the family restaurant, Da Amilcare. She is part of the Roman aristocracy, and her parents, the Alfieri della Scala family, are cultured, elegant, and loving. Both belong to a Rome that is waning: Elettra to the nobility still found in the halls of Palazzo Borghese; Andrea in Rome's downtown taverns, like the one founded by his grandfather, where Fellini, Scola, and Monicelli played scopone. They are still children when, convinced that nothing can separate them, they dream of dying together like Philemon and Baucis, transformed by Zeus into an oak and a linden tree, joined at the trunk. But the idyll is suddenly shattered during a vacation at the Alfieri family's villa on the lake: Electra's mother is involved in a car accident, and the two children accidentally find a letter that instills in them an unbearable doubt. That doubt, and the secret it forces them to keep, will keep them apart for years. Until this phone call, which is destined to reopen everything that had been abruptly interrupted and, perhaps, give a second chance to that first missed love.