Federico is an eighty-year-old impoverished nobleman seeped in Risorgimento ideals. He buys an extremely cheap apartment in Gorizia that looks out over Piazza della Transalpina. The reason the place costs so little is immediately clear: every day a man comes and sits on the Slovenian side of the border of the piazza and with impunity, brazenly stares fixedly at the windows of the apartment. For Federico, this becomes a challenge to be accepted forthwith.