Based on a story by Carlo Cassola, the film tells the story of the meeting between Pina, a thirty-six-year-old who works at the agricultural consortium of a village on the banks of the Po, and Adolfo, a forty-year-old clerk in a bookstore in Rome. It is their first date. The two met through correspondence, thanks to an ad Pina published in a magazine, and now Adolfo is determined to visit her in Ferrara. Pina is cheerful, sweet, loving, and hopeful, in harmony with nature and animals. Adolfo, on the other hand, is cynical, violent, intrusive, manipulative, calculating, and passive-aggressive. Two opposites, Pina and Adolfo, who attract each other, observe each other, get to know each other, and ultimately repel each other. During a long day of getting acquainted, the hopeful joys of the first encounters, the expectations, and surprises gradually give way to disillusionment and coldness, if not even embarrassment, of a mismatched couple from the very first moment spent together.