Synopsis

January 1931. Giulia Bassani, a refined and tormented young poet, lives in a Zurich hotel as if in exile, distant from everyone and indifferent to what is happening around her. She is being treated by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, hoping that depth psychology will help her overcome her inner turmoil. Among those frequenting Jung's study is an Italian revolutionary refugee in Switzerland, Ignazio Silone. Giulia and Ignazio meet on a cold morning in Platzspitz Park, and for a year, at the height of the rise of Nazism and the crisis of democracy, they fall in love. They love each other despite an unbridgeable intellectual distance and a contrasting view of the world, which will lead them towards divergent destinies. With careful and sensitive writing, Giuliano Gallini moves between fiction and historical truth to recount, through an intimate story, a crucial moment in twentieth-century European history, and the vicissitudes and contradictions of one of the most iconic figures of Italian literature of that period.