A Romanian architect who married abroad reunites with his birthplace, with those he met, with the women he loved, with the echoes of what happened once, with the great transformations that are taking place in the Capitol, on construction sites and in Romanian villages. Condemned by an incurable disease, but also overwhelmed by these realities and by the irrepressible longing for his homeland, the hero decides to return home for good.

Ioanide, an apolitical and misunderstood artist who dreams of "things that are normal abroad but impossible here", led a difficult life as an architect under the old regime. After 1944, his situation improved thanks to the benevolence of an enlightened communist nicknamed Botticelli, whom he once hid from the police in the attic of his house. He receives commissions for large-scale cultural monuments, although he has "on file" the ballast of his children lost in the legionary adventure and continues to accept, in his entourage, a circle of sycophants from the former elite.