When Guiseppe Mundula first sees Michele Angelo Chironi across the corridor of a Sardinian orphanage, the blacksmith realizes that he has found the son and heir he never knew he needed. And when a few years later, Michele himself looks down from the ladder on which he is working and sees the beautiful Mercede, he knows that he has found the woman he will marry. So begins Fois' magisterial domestic epic of the lives, loves, and losses of the Chironi family as they struggle through war and fascism and their own tragedy.