Bianca, now an old woman, receives a gift of the diary written years earlier by her dear friend Dora. It casts her into turmoil but is also a chance for her to plunge deep into her memories, reliving the emotions and pain that time has healed. Against the backdrop of Italy’s twenty-year fascist regime, Bianca remembers her past, trying to piece back together the ordeals that marked her and Dora’s childhood and adolescence in Abano, a spa town in the hills of northern Italy.
Young Bianca, unable to conform to the expectations of her old-fashioned family and her fascist boyfriend, kicks against convention, defies her tyrannical uncle and the absurd rules for the ‘new Italian woman’. Her rebellion and lust for freedom bring her repeated tragedy, and in her struggle we glimpse the Italian women who, reduced to mothers and second class citizens, found themselves powerless.