On a small cruise ship, Leonor Silveira, playing a young attractive school teacher traveling with her daughter, points out and comments on sites as they retrace Vasco da Gama's year-long voyage from Lisbon to India some five hundred years earlier -- this time sailing through the Mediterranean Sea and Suez. The obsequious captain, played by John Malkovitch, at the same time he is entertaining three successful European business woman, played by Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli and Irene Pappas, who recount their life experiences in their own languages, intrudes unwantedly on the teacher and daughter... and won't be deterred. Turning to the daughter after the mother rejects him, the story veers into tragedy. Pappas sings beautifully and Sandrelli is the Ava Gardner of Italian cinema.