Aging journalist Jep Gambardella wanders the streets of Rome as he reflects upon the promise of his younger days when he wrote a succesful novel.

An elegy of exile and an epic immersion into the world of rural Italy during the Mussolini years, Francesco Rosi₂s sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and political activist Carlo Levi brings a monument of twentieth-century autobiography to the screen with quiet grace and solemn beauty. Banished to a desolate southern town for his anti-Fascist views, the worldly Levi discovers an Italy he never knew existed.