Mihály quickly reveals his bizarre childhood experiences to her over a bottle of wine, alluding to a set of seemingly unresolved longings for eroticism and death which Erzsi seems to only vaguely comprehend. The plainspoken disharmony between the newlyweds leads to Mihály's detached self-recognition: he is not ready to be Erzsi's husband. He then leaves his wife for his own journey through the Italian countryside and eventually Rome - figuratively tracing the sparkling fanaticisms of his juvenile imagination, even rekindling bonds with changed (and some unchanged) childhood friends - all among the impressive foreign landscapes and peculiar liveliness of its inhabitants.