Antonio, who fled Naples many years ago, has built a family and a successful career in Milan, far from his mother Angela — a woman excessive in both her virtues and her flaws, irresistible, old-fashioned and hostile like few others — who has come to visit for Christmas and seems determined to stay. Christmas Eve dinner becomes an emotional battlefield, at once comic and fierce, bringing to the surface a past of impositions and misunderstandings. With a stubborn capon that refuses to end up in the pot, a daughter whose arrival remains uncertain, and an unexpected distinguished guest, the evening turns into a reckoning between mother and son destined to change the meaning of their bond forever: a love that burns like a fire within, one that never dies out — not even by leaving.

Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.