In 1880 Rome, a patriarch closes the family bakery. His ambitious daughter-in-law manipulates her brothers-in-law to prevent their father's remarriage, securing her inheritance.
Michael is the younger son of a middle-class family, a strong-willed and free-thinking fellow, who is off in some distant country fighting for a revolutionary cause. Everyone in the family writes to him, describing the events of their lives, as they drift into a kind of conventionality which would...
