Rome Adventure

To demonstrate the beauty of love to a student to whom love had been made to be an ugly thing, twenty-one year old Prudence Bell, the assistant librarian at Briarcroft College for Women in Connecticut, provides a copy of a banned romance novel to that student. Due to this action, Prudence faces disciplinary action from the school's board. Instead, Prudence, who has never experienced love herself, decides to take her own advice by quitting, and searching for love by traveling by ship from New York to Rome, where she plans to live. There, she begins a romance with Don Porter, an American graduate student, who has been living in Rome for the past year in the same villa where Prudence is staying. Despite doing nothing improper, they keep their romance a secret if only to stop the gossip in the villa, especially about the summer vacation they take together. An obstacle in their romance arises in the form of artist Lyda Kent, Don's former and more experienced girlfriend, with whom he had a year long romance which she ended turbulently. Lyda's return to Rome is accompanied by some personal issues she is facing which she wants Don's help to resolve. Believing she needs to compete on Lyda's level not only for Don but men in general, Prudence seeks advice from her man-wise boss, bookstore owner Daisy Bronson, and Roberto Orlandi, a suave Italian she met on the trans-Atlantic trip, he who wanted to be Prudence's first love.