Sara is led by her grandfather through the mise-en-scene of a film being shot in ltaly. The landscape in which they walk is the film's plot, masquerading as a state of mind, Its sub-plot woven in with a selection of Bach's Goldberg Variations. The young girl sights Venus strolling through these landscapes, an ‘agent provocateur’ from the country of myth. A filmmaker, In whose imagination this plot is unraveling, approaches a group of producers to fund his film "Aphrodite". The film begins to shift back and forth between archaic and modern notions of myth, highlighting the distinctions between myth and story and the relationships between history and biography.

One of the key factors in Italian unification was the overthrow in 1860 of Francesco, the King of Naples and the two Sicilies, who went into elegant but impoverished exile in Rome with his Queen, Maria Sofia. This seriocomic drama follows the deposed royals as they adapt to their new lives. The former king has recognized the political finality of his deposition, but his queen has taken to traveling in men's clothing all over Italy trying to foment an uprising to restore them to the throne. She is also frantic to have a baby, an heir, but the king has become celibate as a kind of homage to his beloved mother; he spends all his time lobbying the Vatican to get her declared a saint.