While exploring a volcanic island on a yachting expedition, Anna disappears, leaving her lover Sandro and close friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) to search in vain, and fall in love. L'Avventura unfolds against Anna's palpable absence, a love story in a void. 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. (Anna may have escaped.) Love scenes between Claudia and Sandro prepare us for those in The Passenger fifteen years later: love as a stand-off, a sizing-up as before a bullfight, played out-of-doors. L'Avventura is rich in Antonioni's visual architecture, wicked humor, and youth. But, neorealism, for this self-described "black sheep of its family," had already dissolved to modernism, and he never looked back.