Emma and Irma Grammatica are two old-maid sisters. They run a successful business, making shirts, underwear and wedding dresses. The third sister, Olga Solbelli, lives upstairs and makes sarcastic comments. A fourth sister got married and moved away. Emma and Irma have just returned from a meeting with the Pope, who admires their religious embroidery, when their nephew, Massimo Serato, shows up, fleeing from his widowed father. Emma and Irma spoil him in their tight-fisted way; he is young, attractive, gets into scrape with women, and spends what he imagines he will inherit.
Director Ferdinando Maria Poggioli's movie -- he also edited it -- is about the idiosyncratic expressions of love, and how it never works out as we envision.Serato is heedless, self-centered and really turns out to care for the very people he mistreats. His youthful egotism cannot encompass the pain he brings to other, even as his own pride and delusional belief that he does not care about money, only the things that money can buy, inevitably destroy his own vision of how things should work out. His spinster aunts worry about him and hate how he treats them, but inevitably give way, even as the more worldly one resists. Yet for everyone, it is the tribulations of life that force us to live.
