Alice Hanker is a 16 year-old amateur photographer so fascinated by walls that she spends entire rolls of her Leica taking pictures of them.

For the summer, her parents send her to her grandmother’s in Rome. Alice is apprehensive about spending an entire month in the hillside villa with the old lady, who lives in semi-seclusion and does nothing but paint all day. But the thought of all the old Roman walls, guardians of the secrets of the eternal city, reassures her.

Alice unexpectedly finds upon her arrival that there is a mystery to solve: the disappearance of her beloved grandfather ten years earlier. Intent on retracing his story, and with the help of her grandmother’s eccentric lovers, and the maid, Alice puts the puzzle of her estranged family back together.