Isabella Ferrari

Parthenope, born in the sea near Naples in 1950, is beautiful, enigmatic, and intelligent. She is shamelessly courted by many. However, beauty comes at a cost.

Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.

Every Thursday a group of ladies would gather to play cards and discuss their loves, lives and children while their daughters played in the next room. Thirty years later, the daughters meet at a funeral for one of the mothers. Like their mothers, they discuss their hopes, dreams and fears.