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In 1925, in a small church at the outskirts of Turin, Pier Venturi sings at mass each Sunday, his pure voice lending exquisite grace to the familiar litany of prayers.
Pier's talents do not go unnoticed for long, and the day he rides his bicycle into the city centre for the first time, anxiously anticipating a place in the grand cathedral choir, his life changes forever.
With his eyes opened to the glittering life of the -gentry, his budding love for opera develops into a -burning desire for the theatre, for literature, for music - in short, for a cultured life - awakening in him a passion he could never have imagined.
Meantime, at the FIAT car factory where he works, his incipient refinement catches the eye of the beautiful Lena with its echoes of the perceived perfections of her first - and lost - love, a scion of a Florence haute bourgeoisie family, whom he re-joins at the end of his legal studies in Turin. Pier and Lena soon fall deeply in love, but this love becomes for Pier a further source of conflict and guilt because her sweet and simple working-class desires clash with his passionate craving for a cultured life.
As operatic fame beckons and a sultry mezzo-soprano stirs Pier in all the wrong ways, he must decide where his true aspirations lie and overcome the crushing burden of suspicion, mistrust and self-doubt that is the -legacy of his brutish and unhappy childhood.
