Lidia, born in Sicily in an aristocratic and wealthy family, married Pierre, a famous French mathematician, and moved to Paris. However, she kept in her heart the contacts with the family of origin and the memory of the island. Lidia is the pivot of a family that lives the many contradictions of a wealthy bourgeois condition and has to come to terms with her withered life and the torments of her children. The personal stories intertwine and overlap as do the events of two countries that are as close as they are different.