One summer, Harry Clifton and his wife moved unnoticed into a village in the Abbruzzi mountains. Unnoticed, because although the village had a normal population of 90, the return of emigrants from America for the summer had swollen it to three times its size. For the months of July and August, they were lost in the flux of coming and going, as temporary as the rest. Their only strangeness in the eyes of the village was that they spoke little Italian and no mountain dialect. But the couple became the first outsiders to stay on in the village, into the autumn and the winter. They become embroiled in the politics of village life and make friends and enemies with the characters which people it. They learn much about modern Italy even in this most rural of settings - about modern Italians, relationship with the Church and State, the effect of emigration on small communities and how an ancient way of life in small pockets of Europe is under constant threat from encroaching towns.