There is a secret in the life of Mussolini: a wife and a son, Benito Albino, who was born, acknowledged and then denied. The secret bears a name: Ida Dalser. It is a dark page in history, one ignored in the official biography of the Duce. When Ida meets Mussolini in Milan, he is the editor of Avanti! and an ardent Socialist who intends to guide the masses towards an anti-clerical, anti-monarchical, socially emancipated future. Ida already had a fleeting encounter with him in Trento and remained thunderstruck. Ida truly believes in him and his ideas. In order to finance Il Popolo d’Italia, a newspaper he has founded and the nucleus of the forthcoming Fascist Party, Ida sells everything she has. When WWI erupts, Benito Mussolini enrolls in the Army and disappears. When Ida finds him again in a military hospital, he is tended to by Rachele whom he has just married. Ida lashes out at her rival furiously, demanding her rights as Mussolini’s true wife and the mother of his first-born son. She is led away by force. For more than 11 years, she is locked away in an insane asylum (and her son in an institute) where she is put under physical restraint and tortured, never to see her son again. But Ida will not give up without a fight.

Despite the fact he is a middle-aged man, Gianni lives in an old house in the center of Rome with his mother, a woman of faded nobility who tyrannizes him and leaves him only enough free time to go to the tavern. On the eve of the Feast of the Assumption holiday, the apartment block manager--aware of Gianni's enforced "captivity"--suggests he look after his own mother for a couple of days, in return for the waiver of all the unpaid utility bills. When he turns up at his house also accompanied by his old aunt, Gianni feels rather ill. He therefore pays a visit to his doctor friend for a check-up, but even the latter leaves his old mother in Gianni's care for the Feast of the Assumption.

Michael Farr is a widower living in a misty Irish seaside town finds himself drawn to Lena Morelle, an empathetic author of supernatural fiction. Lena tries to help Michael, but she is being jealously pursued by her one-time lover.