The film is set in the summer of 1965. It tells the story of Francesca Johnson, a lonely, insightful Italian housewife in Iowa. While her husband and children are away at the IllinoisState Fair, she meets and falls in love with a photographer, Robert Kincaid, who has come to Madison County, Iowa to shoot a photographic essay for National Geographic on the covered bridges in the area. The four days they spend together are a turning point in her life and she writes of her experience in a diary which is discovered by her children after her death and they are stunned by it.