Luca, a writer, feels terribly lonely, condemned to solitude due to an awful sense of guilt he feels on account of the suicide of Marta the woman he loved. By writing his new novel called Romilly he tries to exorcise his loneliness by sublimating ideal love, but Romilly turns out to be an empty woman and Luca seems to passively accept her lack of depth. During one of his sleepless nights while wandering around the local area he comes across a mysterious abandoned house which stimulates his curiosity. With the help of the custodian, Barretti, Luca manages to rent the house. Here he is able to find that dream-like dimension he has lost, but his peace of mind is disturbed by flashes of his past life. Marta’s beauty is also recalled by the face of a woman frescoed in the attic of the house. This fresco will become the key to an unreal, magic, unhealthy dimension where shadows become haunting ghosts. Thus, the play of shadows, which will prove to be a fatal trap for Luca, begins. Not even his meeting with Alice, an acrobat from a strange circus, seems sufficient to save Luca from the deadly spiral to madness. Alice, who has fallen in love with Luca, offers him a vital and solar chance to taste life once more. But the tunnel into which Luca has found his way is very dark indeed and Alice’s love can do nothing to save him. Thus, Romilly, even if she manages to acquire the beauty and vitality of Alice for a fleeting moment, soon loses her identity again. The novel itself is annihilated by the fact that Luca refuses everything that estranges him from the memory of Marta, from his world of shadows.