In 1944 Tom Wainwright, a British soldier, arrives in the Italian town of Petriano. Tom forges a friendship with the Parini family - and their eldest daughter, Giuliana. He stays in Italy, to build a life with the woman he loves, but in the aftermath of war, his hopes are dashed. Fifty years later Isabel Wainwright, Tom's daughter, attends a ceremony in Petriano, in her father's honour. But Isabel doesn't know whether her father is dead or alive since, twenty years earlier, he went out one day and never returned.