Sofia Marchetti, 36, is an international art appraiser whose speciality is provenance — the legal and historical ownership chains of valuable artworks. She is the best in the world at finding where things really came from, which is a forensic discipline dressed in the clothing of art history. When she is hired to appraise the private collection of recently deceased Venetian noblewoman Contessa Valeria Montefeltro, she arrives at a palazzo on the Grand Canal expecting a straightforward catalogue job and finds instead a collection with deliberate anomalies — pieces positioned to communicate, paintings hiding documents, a dead woman who apparently spent her final years arranging her own collection as a message. The mystery Sofia is solving across the film is what the Contessa wanted her specifically to find, and why she was chosen. The romance with Marco Cattaneo — a Venetian detective assigned to ensure the palazzo's contents are legally inventoried — develops across the investigation with the specific dynamic of two professionals who are each better at their job than the other expected.
