While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, a troubled young woman named Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L'avventura unfolds against Anna's very palpable absence, a love story in a void. As always, landscape is the screen onto which Antonioni projects human emotions. Anna's pain is articulated in the parched suburb from which she came, and in the rocky island on which her cohorts wander, not realizing it is they who are lost.