Rome, 1864. Luisa Stecca helps women in the popular neighbourhoods of a city still ruled by papal power, among dusty alleys, convents, shops and a population struggling to survive. She assists with often clandestine pregnancies and welcomes girls and mothers into her home in Piazza del Fico. Among these women is Angela Carbone. Born into an unfortunate family, she is a girl determined to escape the poverty that suffocates her. With the help of her sister, Gertrude, and a reluctant Luisa, she devises a perfect deception: she fakes a pregnancy to bind herself to the wealthy knight Armando Bachino, and when Amalia, a young woman left to fend for herself, gives birth to a son, she passes him off as her own.

But the truth is a force that digs deep and demands to be heard. Tensions, affections and recriminations arise around little Armando: his natural mother wants him back, his adoptive mother defends him, the knight discovers he has been betrayed but is unable to give up the child. And as Rome approaches the fall of the Pope's temporal power, Angela's illusions also begin to crumble. Amid confessions, revelations and a real trial, a story unfolds of wounded but stubborn women, of denied and invented motherhood.

Through a brilliant combination of events that actually happened and are documented in ecclesiastical archives, Margherita Pelaja asks topical questions about the meaning of words such as family, love and belonging. Le donne di piazza del Fico recounts a distant past and achieves the miracle of creating an urgent, elegant and contemporary voice.