Grandmother RenÔee, a beautiful Tunisian, is wife, muse, and model for Alina's painter grandfather, but she leaves him and flees to Nazi Germany. Alina's mother, Alba, marries a melancholic screenwriter and lives la dolce vita in 1950s Rome until her husband's mysterious death. Isabella, Alina's sister and once her best friend, finds herself drawn to a dangerous ideology in the 1970s; the sisters' love for one another soon shifts to a betrayal of which they can never speak. As these individual lives unfold, so does the larger one—the story of a family whose secrets collide with history.