Interlinked stories of two women, both German-speaking Italians from the fictional South Tyrolese village of Stillbach. Emma and Ines come to work in Rome at different times and end up spending their entire lives there. Alternating with an account from the 1970s told by Ines is the story of Emma, who arrived in the capital via Venice in the late 1930s, driven from her northern homeland by economic hardship. Emma remains in Rome throughout the Nazi occupation and its immediate aftermath, becomes pregnant, marries the father and eventually inherits the family business. Her fiancé, a Stillbach boy drafted into the SS, had been a victim of a partisan bomb. Vivid and painful memories of that loss well up in Emma, as well as nostalgia for her native Boze.