“What do we talk about when we talk about love”?
Three couples, privileged fire: the female characters,  Deborah,19, Veronica, 36, Erika, 76.
For each of them, in their different ways, living their relationship represents a challenge with themselves, with their needs, their idea of freedom, social judgments.
We attempted to question ourselves on what freedom really is, how authentic, actual, pure it is, and to what extent it is compromised with needs, delusions, fears, compensations, guilty feelings, so cumbersome that they end up denying freedom. We came to no definite answer, but to an impression of great intensification of the question. It is the giddiness of being privileged travel partners, invited to observe and bear witness to conflicts, hopes, passions and anxieties that like blizzards stir our six characters, desperate  funambulists trying to reach the other end of the rope.

CHAPTER 1. DEBORA
 “I think I’ll give her what my mom didn’t give to me”

Debora is twenty. She has wild eyes and a pin-up’s body. She is beautiful and she knows it. A fatherless child, she ran away from home to seek her fortune in Milan when she was fourteen. She is engaged to Filippo, who is always broke and who served a few years in prison for drug pushing. After working as a barmaid in Milan, Debora began to star in hard-core movies, live shows and live erotic chat-line TV programmes. She has been making good money since then, and she is dreaming of a future as a TV show assistant. She looks down on nightclub customers, but she enjoys performing on stage. Filippo is very jealous, but he pretends not to know about Debora’s job for a long time. The money she earns comes in handy for both.  One day, Debora finds out she is pregnant and decides to keep her baby. Filippo comes out and asks her to give up her job. They fight. Debora used to feel free to use her body to make a living, but her pregnancy and Rebecca’s birth compel her to call her job and wishes into question. Reckoning with the acceptability of her own image thus becomes more difficult.
Debora decides to break off her work; the new family ends up squatting and even lacking the money for the baby’s artificial milk. Debora would like to provide her daughter with all the things she has never had, but since Rebecca was born she has felt she must look on herself and her own freedom in a different way.

CHAPTER 2. ERIKA
“…Then there’s age, well, what can I do with it? That’s as it is, it’s not an illness. I was born before him, that’s all”

Erika is seventy-six years old. She is a rich, cultivated, multilingual woman. She owns a flat in Milan and a villa in Sardinia, and she has always had a taste for the exotic and for travelling.
She left two marriages behind her: the first one with a Japanese architect who fathered her two daughters, and the second with an Egyptian man she divorced because of a “lack in mutual sexual understanding”. However, Erika has never stopped believing in love and passion.
Today she lives with Moussad, her third husband, a thirty-five-year-old Senegalese man she met while on holiday. He dreams of becoming a football player in Italy, and he left his African wife and three children to follow Erika.
Erika feels she has found her new Prince Charming.
She loves his smooth skin and his gentleness in their intimacies. She likes observing how much her Italian lady friends appreciate him. Yet, age and culture place several obstacles in the way of their everyday life.
For now Moussad makes a living by distributing leaflets. He knows Erika is a great opportunity for him to improve his social and financial situation.
Is theirs love? Perhaps. Granted, Erika and Moussad represent a kind of couple that is now possible only thanks to the comparatively recent – and partial – social approval of women’s freedom. Probably nobody could call their love unreserved; again, it is rather a form of relationship where love implicates other issues, needs and expectations which blend with it in an inextricable mixture of purity and interest.

CHAPTER 3. VERONICA
“The pilgrimage was 6 days long. We met on day 2 and I would have married him on day 6. That changed my mind, my heart, everything. This is what Lourdes can do. It can do anything”.

Veronica is thirty-five years old and lives in Felina (Reggio Emilia). She is married to Alberto. They met in Lourdes. She had gone there as a nurse because she “had to help other people”; he was there as an invalid, for he suffers from an uncommon kind of multiple sclerosis. Before Alberto, Veronica had only had one true love: Luca, who died as an eighteen-year-old. After Luca, Veronica did not want to have anything to do with men or love affairs anymore. She gave up studying art and became a nurse. When she met Alberto, it was love at first sight. Their marriage has now lasted 7 years, in spite of the opposition of both their families. After 5 years they had their first baby, then came the second one. Alberto’s illness is taking its implacable course, but Veronica – who must take care of everything for her husband, who is not self-sufficient – keeps on seeing less his shortcomings than his resources. Alberto healed a sore in Veronica’s life. Veronica’s freedom has materialized in the partial deprivation of her own freedom and in the enhancement of Alberto’s freedom to “live a full, normal existence”. In such a seemingly heroic choice, freedom is made conditional on the need to heal a deficiency with another deficiency.