The film is set in the sunlit city of Naples. The smiling Parthenope recalls her childhood, in which her brothers were obsessed with her. Her anthropology professor finds her a brilliant student.
She considers becoming an actor, but is not inspired by her eccentric acting coach. She wonders about becoming an aesthete, and meets the drunken writer John Cheever, whose work she admires. Or perhaps she could have a romantic fling with the ugly bishop who attends the miracle of the dried blood that turns liquid each year, the phenomenon she is studying in anthropology...
