Elisabeth is only 30 years old, but she no longer expects anything from her life, comfortable and monotonous, even in a city like New York. She loves architecture, music, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but true love, the kind that rips your skin off and makes you alive to the core, she has never known. Her existence so predictable, in the shadow of an icy mother, is suddenly shaken: she must go to Parma, take possession of a noble apartment bequeathed to her by a distant relative, and get rid of it. Parma welcomes her mysteriously and disturbingly, and the house, dense with light and charm, sucks Elisabeth into another Time. She finds a door, puts her ear to it, the notes of a waltz echo…
Young Clementina, Contessina Mora di Castelgioioso, 17 years of pure joy despite the trials to which life has already subjected her, makes her debut at the Grand Spring Ball of the Duchess of Parma, Maria Luisa of Habsburg-Lorraine. It is 1827, there is a scent of flowers in the sensual May air. The Grand Duchess immediately takes a liking to Clementina, so much so that she becomes her lady-in-waiting. This is how Clementina meets General Neipperg, Marie Louise’s husband: a dizzying and inescapable encounter, destined to change her life forever.
What connects two women, so distant in Time and opposite in character, who mysteriously speak to each other? The truth that has been hidden from us for centuries about love. Love is not deserved, love-the most visceral and vital of feelings-can only happen, and when it does, it is total surrender that it asks of us, to give us in return what will make our passage through this world eternal.
