The life of Roberto Rossellini is narrated by looking back at his early years in Rome within his family, by visiting the places where he lived or shot his films, such as Rome, the Amalfi coast and Paris and by listening to the recollections of his collaborators, his sons and daughters and his women, and the opinions of those who chose him as their Master, both in Italy and across the world.

The excerpts from his works mark the various stages in his artistic career. The purpose of the film is, above all, to disprove the many commonplaces about his private life and his poetic world. The film also disproves the commonplace about the artistic relation between Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, which seems to survive even today. He invited this extraordinary Hollywood icon to work in his country, with the risk of shattering her from a commercial point of view and definitely losing all the credit he had earned with the huge success of “ Roma città’ aperta". He paid dearly for his consistency. He was slowly marginalised from the market.

However, his was a great response to that strong need for a European and an Italian identity, that torments us even today and to which Rossellini gave an extraordinary and prophetic contribution. Thanks chiefly to French critics, his three films with Bergman are universally acknowledged as innovators of cinema and cornerstone contributions to the creation of modern cinema. On the big and small screen, his films are like the many chapters of story narrated through pictures.