Synopsis
Antonia and Massimo have been married for over ten years; they live in a nice villa in the residential suburbs of Rome and they're a happy couple. Massimo suddenly dies in a car accident.Antonia gives way to absolute grief, attended by her mother Veronica and the Filipino maid Nora.
Antonia can't manage to pull herself together; she doesn't go to work, she neglects her friends and colleagues, she shuts herself off in her pain.
Until she happens to discover that Massimo had a lover for seven years.
Her investigations to find out who it is force Antonia to come out of her shell of pain.
Following only the trail of a surname and an address, Antonia manages to find the house of her husband's lover, who lives in a working class district of the city, and she discovers that it's not another woman ... but a man, Michele. There is a dramatic confrontation between the two of them, but also an attraction: after all they were both in love with the same man.
Antonia discovers that Michele is surrounded by a real 'family' of friends, who had become her husband's second family.
The difference between the two families is that Antonia and Massimo's family was a 'closed' and purely sheltered unit, while Michele and Massimo's family was 'open' to the rest of the world, where men and women live without distinction with regard to sexual orientation, age, race and social class. Getting to know each other better, Antonia and Michele discover that they have much more in common with each other than either of them had with Massimo.
Antonia is actually drawn into this new nucleus of an alternative and extended family, almost like a substitute for Massimo. And she too begins to project onto Michele her need for love, from which she was orphaned by the death of her husband.
Through a series of dramatic and amusing, tragic and ironic experiences, Antonia and Michele come close to the possibility of falling in love with each other.
But Antonia, realising that what joins them is still the ghost of Massimo, decides to leave. But her departure is not an escape.
The experience with Michele and his friends has not only helped Antonia get her grief out of her system, but has also made her understand that she has always lived protecting herself from life. She is now ready to open up to the world and start again. She is ready to love again.
