Synopsis

When her father returned home from the war in 1918, Caterina didn't recognize him. He was dirty, thin, and his eyes were dull: at five years old, Nina felt the fear of death for the first time. She already knew what it meant to be born in the Veneto mountains, in a small village where life meant working in the pastures and toiling in the woods. The day Mario, her friend who played in the barns and ran through the fields, left for Milan where school, always dressed in white, and a better future awaited him, Caterina began to long for a different existence. She spent hours poring over the few books she could find, learning to be a seamstress so she could escape from home and pursue that something that called to her, perhaps the dream of love with Mario. Sharp-edged, headstrong, rebellious in her own way, Caterina was a woman of many sacrifices and small satisfactions, who worked doggedly for a better life, wearing out her hands and her youth: one of those characters we've encountered in family stories. With her, we follow the history of the last century from a new perspective, in the changing Veneto province while Nina remains attached to her old desires. And Mario is the obsession of a total feeling, a ghost to be chased across the decades.