From the acclaimed writer Susan Minot, author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories and Folly, and the legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor (winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture), The Sheltering Sky, and Little Buddha, comes a hauntingly beautiful film about innocence, seduction, and the pain and pleasures of youth.

Following the death of her mother, nineteen-year-old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to Italy to stay with old family friends and to have her portrait done. She is eager to renew her acquaintance with Niccolò Donati, the handsome young boy from a neighboring family with whom she shared her first kiss on a visit four years earlier, and anxious to solve a riddle left in her mother's diary, the answer to which may change Lucy's life forever.