War and love. tears and laughter, the worst and the best that can happen to someone - in brief, life, in Rome, ruled by the Nazis, in 1943. The man in question is called Vittorio, Vittorio De Sica. Easy to speak well of him now, but then he was just a 'comedian', an actor without future, protégé of no-one: someone who could count only on himself and his own imagination. And, one day, a German patrol turns up on the movie set where he is working. They are looking for him, find him and take him away, to their commander who wants a word with him. Goebbels in person has written to him, sending him a request which is an order.
De Sica is trapped, but...

A narrator, Marco Paolini, brings the story back from oblivion: a true story from De Sica's life, but also the story of Italy in those years; the eternal and very Italian art of arrangiarsi, of using imagination to make a virtue of necessity; the misfortunes and nobility of a turning?point in the Italian experience. The narrator re-evokes, suggests and interprets, perhaps inventing a little too...