EN PLEIN AIR

August, 2001, finds renown American painter Orla Castleberry in Naples, Italy, where she has been researching human trafficking perpetrated by the Camorra, a notorious criminal enterprise. Her realistic renderings of the Camorristi’s denigration and abuse of young women, primarily from Nigeria, not only increase public awareness of and aid for victims, but also provoke the Camorristi to harass and threaten Orla and her family.

Fortuitously, Orla, her physician husband, Celestino Bacci, and their ten-year-old twins, Luisa and Lucca, set off for an academic year in Manhattan. There the Italian-born children experience American education and urban life while Orla enjoys an endowed professorship in the visual arts and Celestino joins an AIDS research group. Their pleasant adjustment to city life is abruptly truncated when two planes crash into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11th. The universal horror of the attacks turns personal, as well, since Orla’s adopted daughter Mercy and Mercy’s husband work in the towers.

These and other personal traumas shake Orla’s considerable confidence and fortitude, causing her to question her life’s work. At age fifty, then, Orla asks herself: does art really matter?