Relative Values

Relative Values follows the fortunes of two young Englishmen who travel to Italy fifty years apart. Max Caddick has witnessed the effects of the Depression in England, including the rise of the blackshirted English Fascist Party and has developed strong left-wing views which cost him his employment. Fascinated by Art, as well as politics, he decides to make his way down to Italy to see the work of the great Renaissance artists at first hand. Picking up odd jobs wheenever he can, his life becomes complicated when he becomes involved with the daughter of a prominent fascist family. Almost fifty years later, Paul Caddick who has recently graduated in Italian heads to Italy to teach English, have a good time and see whether he can locate any of his mysterious Italian relatives. This last task proves to be more difficult than he had expected as the family name seems to provoke only either hostility or a wall of silence. When he finds out the depths of his family's involvement with the worst excesses of Mussolini's regime, it is far worse than he could have imagined. During his search, he manages to establish contact with a cousin who has also been kept in the dark about the family's past by a grandmother who had rejected the family and tried to create a new life - but even this grandmother has a dark secret which she has struggled to keep hidden since the confusion that surrounded the liberation of Florence in 1944.