Veronica, a 16-year-old girl, is spending the Christmas holidays at her grandfather's in a small village in the Sicilian hinterland when a woman disappears and the fear of the monster who had sown terror in the area ten years earlier returns. The girl suddenly begins to feed a terrible suspicion: her own grandfather could be the culprit.
January 6, 1980. President of the Sicily Piersanti Mattarella is going to Mass with his family when a young man approaches his car and shoots him in cold blood, killing him. The young Deputy Prosecutor on duty that day is Pietro Grasso, future General Anti-Mafia Prosecutor and President of the Italian Senate. His investigations are continued by Giovanni Falcone, who uncovers dangerous connections between the Mafia, the ruling Christian Democratic Party, neo-fascist terrorists, and secret services.
In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the silence and complicity that surround her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance.
In 18th-century Sicily, deaf-mute highborn Marianna Ucrìa is forced to marry at age 13, bearing three children before even turning 16, when she finally gives birth to a boy. Despite everything, she'll find a way to emancipate herself from the oppressive social conventions of the time.
Orlanda, Liuccia, Milù, Blu Blu and Veronica are five women in Palermo, Sicily, each different from the other. But, along with transvestite Kim and young man Maurizio, they all share something: they're "buttane", hookers, who spend the day between the streets and home; some got children, some got problems with the pimps, some with the clients...