Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.
Naples, early 1980s. The strained marriage between Aldo and Vanda is fractured one evening when Aldo admits, unprompted, his infidelity. Equally hurt and bewildered, Vanda attempts to hide her pain from the couple's two school-age kids, lest they discover that their cramped apartment is not a home of trust and love. 30 years later, Aldo and Vanda are still tied together, but their relationship with each other and their children continues to be defined by what happened all those years ago.
Year 1100. Italy.The Northern lands are ruled by a German emperor: Fredrick aka "Barbarossa. His dream is to conquer also the lands in the Center and in the South so as to revive the Empire that was once of the one Charles Magno.But in the North a young man from Milan has formed an army of 900 young men coming from different cities: the "company of death". This young man's name is Alberto Da Giussano. His dream is to defeat the Emperor and to give back freedom to the Northern lands.
A man wearing shorts leaves his house to go jogging with his dog. All around him, Rome struggles awake at dawn. A lengthy marathon from St. Peter's to the Appian Way, a single shot crammed with centuries of history, freak encounters, and a wacky, vivid sincerity.
After constant arguments with his parents and after being left by the girl who dumped him for an engineer, Mike leaves university and starts managing a laundry hoping to find himself and escape from his life. But what he tries to distance himself from will present itself to him in the form of other people, the laundry customers, who like him struggle to be in this world. Among these he meets Laura, the client in the diving suit, who after isolating herself from the rest of the world is trying to reopen herself to people and life...
Grandfather Alcide is given a surprise party by his many relatives. He, however, dies of a heart attack. The dearly departed turns out to have been a hardened saver and leaves an astonishing amount of money to his two sons, Alfredo and Nunzio, who suddenly find themselves dealing with a large sum of money. On the advice of Nunzio, the younger brother, Alfredo decides to move to Rome to open a restaurant serving typical Calabrian cuisine, Il Piparedduzzo.
Rome, 1989. On his last day of high school, Luca gets in trouble when he takes it all out on hated literature teacher Martinelli, only to discover he's going to be heading the examination board for his finals. During a summer of fruitless study, he falls in love with a girl he met once at a party, unaware that she's Martinelli's daughter. The latter, strangely enough, has just offered Luca to prepare with him...
The gorgeous young actress Ginette auditions for the lead role in the first long feature film of the controversial artist Alex Sherba and she's almost immediately submitted to a long series of harassing questions and indecent proposals. Alex quickly turns out to be a mentally unstable and potentially dangerous man, and when she finds an earring belonging to a missing friend of hers, Ginette even suspects that he might be a killer and starts her very own private investigation. Meanwhile, the torturing of other poor girls cheerfully continues in the dungeon of Alex' parental house.