The film's sets were designed by the art directors Ivo Battelli and Guido Fiorini.

In nineteenth-century Italy, promising singer Rosi Belloni meets American music student Harry Peters and the two become engaged and she falls pregnant by him.

Before she can tell him this news, he informs her he is returning to the United States for three years for further musical education.

Five years later Peters, now a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, returns to Italy with his new American wife.

Encountering the five-year-old son who has been raised to honour the idea of his father, Peters comes to realise what he missed by not marrying Belloni.