Trama

Karin, a young woman from the Baltic countries, marries fisherman Antonio to escape from a prison camp. But she cannot get used to the tough life in Antonio's volcano-threatened village, Stromboli.

Living in an Italian refugee camp in 1948, the beautiful Karin meets Antonio, a resident of the men's camp. Though not in love with him, Karin marries him and they soon head for his home village, Stromboli. The village is on a remote island at the foot of an active volcano. When they arrive Karin despairs of the barren land and the absence of people, as many have left, mostly for the United States. She doesn't speak the local dialect and is treated with disdain by locals who see her as an exotic foreigner and a loose woman. After Antonio beats her and locks her in their house, she sets off across the mountains to seek her freedom and a better future.—garykmcd

Enticed into following Antonio, the silver-tongued inmate of a crowded internment camp in 1948 Italy, to his home island of Stromboli, Karin, a displaced Lithuanian, agrees to marry him. However, in the barren volcanic rock Antonio calls home, the dream of a better life soon turns sour, as contempt, hostility, and a daunting language barrier get in the way of happiness. But, only God knows how hard Karin has tried to fit in and reconcile her wants with the conservative inhabitants' unwavering beliefs; nevertheless, in vain. Now, as once-silent Stromboli begins to tremble, Karin must summon up the courage to pursue her dream, and above all, her freedom. Still, will Stromboli let Karin escape so easily?—Nick Riganas

In this, the post-WWII era, Karin, a Lithuanian national married during and widowed a result of the war, is being housed in a displacement camp in Farfa, Italy. Failing to earn her release to her desired destination of Argentina on her own merits, she decides to accept the marriage proposal of Mario, another camp resident, he a former Italian POW who intends to return to his home of the island of Stromboli in the Mediterranean. Karin views Mario solely as a sweet boy who can get her out of the camp. However, Karin eventually finds that Stromboli is not the beautiful island she envisioned or that Mario made it out to be, but an arid, desolate environment where the active volcano that produced the island is always threatening life there. In addition to the island being a pseudo prison in there only being a handful of ways on and off, Karin finds that marriage to controlling Mario is another type of prison in she not having the same vision of that life as him, where, while he earns a living as a fisherman, he expects her solely to tend to the house and farm the black soil. Her problems are exacerbated by she not knowing the language, with Mario's English - their only common language - broken at best, and she viewed as an outsider by the majority of the residents, the men who see her solely as an object akin to a prostitute, while the women view her as immoral for not adhering to their traditions. What she considers her only true friendships on the island, with the local priest and a lighthouse employee, are also fraught with problems. The questions then become whether Karin will accept her life on the island, or if she will find a way to escape her new physical and emotional prisons. The volcano may factor into what happens with her.—Huggo