Synopsis
Clara Grandi Fossà is a young and noble woman with a free and rebellious spirit who was separated from her twin brother and forced into an arranged marriage. Despite this, she falls in love with her husband and fights to win his love.
However Clara falls victim to her aunt’s and cousin’s conspiracies, as they are determined to steal her inheritance and to destroy her marriage, by instilling jealousy and suspicions of adultery. While seeking the truth, Clara starts to suffer mysterious hallucinations and a nervous breakdown.
One day, someone tries to kill Clara, leaving her to drown in the waters of the Adige River….
Clara’s body is never found. Everyone believes she committed suicide. Clara survives and, in disguise, her face hidden beneath a black veil, she returns to her family in search of the truth and to punish the guilties.
The Lady with the Black Veil is a great historical mural set in northern Italy in the late 1800s that unites melodrama and elements of a crime story.
“A lady dressed in black, her dark hair pulled back, her face hidden behind a veil, observes a gentleman weeping before his wife’s tomb. She has never seen anyone cry so desperately.
Yet, is this really a heartfelt demonstration of despair? Did he truly love his wife or was he deceiving in his ways? Does he cry tears of regret or contrition? Instinctively she would like to run to him and embrace him. To tell him that his wife didn’t really drown herself in the river like everyone believes.
That she had been unhappy, but that she loved him. To ask him about their little girl, Aurora. But the memory of the whip that scourged her face suddenly startles her. She can still feel the throbbing pain inside her wound. She can see the hands of the man that lifted her off the ground. The hooves of the horses. The sound of the river. Guido, was that you? That’s what this lady dressed in black, Countess Clara Grandi Fossà, would like to ask him. Was it you who watched me drown? Yet her husband has already dried his tears and is heading off towards his coach.”
Who is Clara Grandi Fossà, the lady dressed in black, who everyone thinks has drown in the depths of the river?
What is her story?
