Cesira is a widowed shopkeeper, raising her devoutly religious twelve-year-old daughter, Rosetta, in Rome during World War II. After the bombing of Rome, mother and daughter flee to Cesira's native Ciociaria, a rural, mountainous province of central Italy. The night before they go, Cesira has sex with Giovanni, a married coal dealer in her neighbourhood, who agrees to look after her store in her absence. The move marks a shifting chapter in their lives, as they leave behind the city’s bustle and the war’s danger to seek safety in a landscape that tests their bond in new and difficult ways.
Upon arriving in Ciociaria, Cesira attracts the attention of Michele, a young local intellectual with communist sympathies. Rosetta sees Michele as a father figure and forms a close, almost filial bond with him, finding in his presence a sense of guidance and affection that stands in stark contrast to the turmoil they left behind in Rome. Michele’s charisma and ideas give the family a momentary sense of solidarity in uncertain times. Yet the war’s reach intrudes even here, as Michele is later captured and kept by German soldiers, who compel him to act as a guide through the treacherous mountainous terrain.
As the Allies push forward and Rome falls back into their hands in June 1944, Cesira and Rosetta decide to return to the city they once called home. The journey back is torn by peril, fear, and the brittle line between safety and violence. On the road, a devastating act occurs inside a church: a group of Moroccan Goumiers, soldiers attached to the invading Allied Armies in Italy, gang-rape the two women. The experience leaves Rosetta traumatized, the trauma seeping into her every gesture and memory, causing her to become distant and withdrawn from her mother and the world she once knew.
The trauma reshapes their relationship as they find shelter in a nearby village. Rosetta disappears during the night, triggering a frantic search by Cesira, who fears that her daughter has wandered off, possibly in search of Michele. The revelation soon follows that Michele did not survive the war’s brutality; he was killed by the Germans. This loss compounds the pain already etched into Rosetta, who returns later having spent time with an older boy who has given her silk stockings—a gesture that shocks Cesira and disrupts the daughter’s sense of innocence.
Cesira’s response to Rosetta’s behavior is one of stern, if conflicted, maternal discipline: she scolds, slaps, and disciplines her, attempting to reassert control and care. Yet Rosetta remains emotionally distant, a child no longer fully present in the mother-daughter dynamic, as if the innocence she once carried has been irrevocably altered by the night’s violence and the war’s disruptions. The story culminates in a quiet, intimate moment of reconciliation: Cesira, bearing the weight of all that has happened, offers comfort to her now-fragile daughter, trying to mend a bond stretched to the breaking point.
In this portrait of love tested by catastrophe, the film grounds its narrative in the intimate, stubborn resilience of a mother and daughter as they navigate memory, loss, and the uneasy path toward healing.
