Sarebbe bellissimo

It is 16 March 1978. It seems like any other morning for the Massironi family in Piccola Russia, a working-class neighbourhood in Bassano del Grappa. Olga is in the kitchen heating milk for breakfast and Pietro is getting ready for another day at the carpentry workshop. The children are still asleep. A few hundred kilometres away, however, in Via Fani, the Red Brigades kidnap Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro. These are days of confusion and anguish. The dramatic news stories that open the television news upset the family’s already precarious balance. Pietro, an old-school communist, is absorbed in politics and disappointed by the way the Italian Communist Party is handling the Moro kidnapping. He spends most of his time away from home and does not know how to deal with Olga’s sadness, as she sinks into depression. Their children Nora and Tonio notice this and watch helplessly as their parents’ marriage falls apart. Fortunately, there are Angela and Caterina, the aunts every child would like to have. The former takes care of the whole family while dreaming of finding true love. The second has already found it in the arms of Blanca, a Spanish girl for whom she is willing to challenge the provincial respectability. Together, the Massironi family faces the great changes that await them as best they can, in search of new identities and forms of happiness different from those they had long imagined. A small story that flows within a big story. Ours.