Maddalena Labardi [Phyllis Calvert] is a convent schoolgirl in Florence who endures a brutal assault by a gypsy while picking flowers in 1910, a trauma that quietly shadows her throughout the years. The experience fragments her life in ways that surface later as a dual sense of self, with memories and impulses that seem to exist apart from each other. As decades pass, the story follows how this hidden fracture affects family ties, love, and trust, even as pride, devotion, and danger mingle in unexpected ways.
In 1919, Maddalena leaves the convent to marry Giuseppe Labardi [John Stuart] in Rome, and together they raise a daughter, Angela Labardi [Patricia Roc]. The bond between mother and daughter remains central, though Angela grows up with a sense that her mother’s moods can shift without warning. By the time Angela returns to Rome in 1940 after five years of schooling in England, she notices her mother behaving oddly and notes that Maddalena once vanished for a full year, leaving questions about what really lies behind those disappearances.
At Angela’s birthday party, a new figure arrives: Sandro Barucci [Peter Glenville], a gigolo who complicates the already tense family atmosphere. Maddalena faints that night and then disappears again, this time donning gypsy clothing and drawing seven moons on her mirror—a recurring motif that signals a deeper transformation. She reappears in Florence at the House of the Seven Moons, a seedy enclave where she is welcomed as Rosanna, the mistress of gypsy thief Nino Barucci [Stewart Granger], a man she had encountered during her earlier absence. The household’s doctor, Dr Charles Ackroyd [Reginald Tate], begins to sense that Maddalena’s crisis is more than ordinary memory lapses: he suspects that trauma has split her identity, leaving two halves that do not communicate.
As the family searches for her, Sandro travels to Florence with Angela to locate Maddalena. In a troubling turn, Sandro drugs Angela and attempts to assault her, revealing the danger that shadows her family’s past. Maddalena discovers this intrusion and, mistaking the visitor for Nino’s betrayal, stabs him; he responds in kind, mirroring the violence that has etched itself into their lives. The confrontation draws to a close with Maddalena briefly reunited with Angela before she dies, a culmination that forces those left behind to confront the consequences of their tangled loyalties.
In the end, Nino returns to Maddalena’s deathbed, driven by jealousy and a lingering hunger for control. He contemplates killing Giuseppe Labardi but hesitates when he learns they had already been married, a revelation that reframes the entire saga and casts a somber light on the cost of secrets kept for too long. The film closes on a note of quiet tragedy, where love, memory, and longing collide with fate, leaving the living to reckon with a past that never quite released its grip.
This story unfolds with a steady, restrained tone, inviting viewers to parse how trauma can fracture a life and ripple through generations, how love can shelter and betray in equal measure, and how the pursuit of truth can lead to a fatal, yet inevitable, reckoning.
