Occupied Naples, 1944. Twenty-two-year-old James Gould is the ‘Wedding Officer’, responsible for discouraging British soldiers from marrying the local women. When he becomes rather too good at his job, the local girls arrange for him to employ a girl from Vesuvius called Livia Pertini as his cook, in the hopes that her remarkable skills in the kitchen – not to mention her beauty – will civilise him. Under her influence, James learns to stop worrying about unimportant matters such as war brides, black marketeering, mafia corruption and so on – but when Vesuvius erupts, destroying Livia’s village, he realises that he is also going to have to make a choice between his orders and his heart.