In Bologna, at the time of the Liberation, a troubled young man with literary aspirations falls in love at first sight with a beautiful American army nurse. The following year, in the American Midwest, he will go to live in a house next to that of his beloved, separated only by an ominous vegetable garden. There lives his elderly mother, desperate by the disappearance of her daughter who has not given any news of herself since the end of the conflict. Thus begins the boy's tense search that will make him experience a terrifying situation, until a completely unexpected conclusion in Italy.