Italy, September 1943. After the armistice and the flight of the King, the war theaters of the North-East see the advance of Tito's partisans. At the center of the story, in this dramatic historical context, the figure of Norma Cossetto, a young Istrian student, barbarously raped, killed and thrown into a foiba by the Tito partisans.

After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lives of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family take different directions, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.