A surprise phone call from her late fiancé's family sends Vivien Lowry of Bloomsbury Girls off on her next adventure. Struggling as a playwright she moves to Italy both to reckon with her past and create a new future as a scriptwriter at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Here she encounters the greatest male bastion of them all the Vatican. Vivien ends up entangled between the church and the censors while romantically caught between two men: an enigmatic American film financier who is not who he says he is and a socialist Italian prince and independent filmmaker who ends up under house arrest over a censored screenplay. Each of them has a wartime experience from their past that they must revisit in order to move on - Vivien most of all.
