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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 perhaps have horrified them earlier. Only Michael’s girlfriend Mara, the mother of his child, retains her independence, even though it is through the help of Michael’s increasingly conventional friends and family that she survives.