Armino Fabbio works as a guide for a travel company. Together with tourists on a bus, he moves from one city in Italy to another. This lifestyle suits him quite well. But an incident that happened in Rome (a beggar woman was killed near a church, whom Armino recognizes as a maid who once worked in his parents’ house), forces the hero to leave his job and return to Ruffano, the town where he spent his childhood. There, unexpectedly for himself, he finds his brother, who was considered dead in 1943. Although this meeting can hardly be called joyful. Aldo, a university professor, lives in the world of his own fantasies, imagining himself as Duke Claudio, nicknamed the Falcon, who several centuries before the present events lived in Ruffano and kept the entire population of the town in fear. This line between present and future, fiction and reality, at first glance so thin, turns out to be so strong that only death can break it.