When Valentino, a retired mechanic from a little Italian village offers thirty antique roses to his wife Eleonora to celebrate their thirty-year anniversary, he had not foreseen the effects of his gift. Today, his garden – that borders the highway, the railway and a football field – hosts more than two thousand rose bushes, each one different from the other. Eleonora, a lively housewife, knows the story behind every plant: “The rose is not just the symbol of love!” – she tells visitors who flock to see her garden like bees to a hive – “but of several kinds of love!” Eleven months of pruning among stingy thorns – Valentino on the high ladder, Eleonora on the lower bushes – for just one month of bliss: antique roses only bloom in May. In the biggest rose garden of Europe love is mostly an act of daily care.

Director’s statement: Should I portray roses or the gardeners who cultivate them? I wonder how one could exist without the other. A rose-bud needs a finger to point at its beauty, and every hand (and every heart) has been, at least once, unexpectedly stung by a thorn. With the turn of the seasons, Eleonora and Valentino work silently side by side. Every morning, they face the very symbol of love: The Rose. But a rose is not just the glorious opening of petals, it envolves thorns, buds and hips as well. Then, I wonder, should we not see love in all its parts? I believe, in fact, that love should be told in its different declinations, shown in its many shapes and shades. By sharing daily pleasures and daily fatigues, Valentino and Eleonora can renew the bliss of blooming every May. And, as they always say, rose gardeners live up to one-hundred years.