Matilde is a woman who has already inherent insanity because she can't seem to find meaning in her husband's family anymore, since he doesn't respect her. All of this and the malicious insinuations, being subjected to the violent acts of her father in law, are getting her to fall into a state of great distress and instability.

In 1985 in Milan Michele Croce is now in prison and decides to answer the magistrate's questions, telling how in the seventies he became the ruler of the Milanese underworld.

Superintendent Chessari is sent to run a small police station on the outskirts of Rome - a temporary posting in a difficult area, with not much backing and very few staff. His deputy, Lorenzo Corsi, is a youngster just out of the Academy, full of enthusiasm and high principles which clash with the corrupt reality of the streets and the attitude of his colleagues. The small police station seems like an outlying frontier post, a sort of backwater where recruits and hot-heads are assigned to rot. Chessari wants a quiet life, and all he does is set up a few routine operations; following suspects and tapping phones. He tries to avoid making waves that might upset his plans for career advancement. His men, however, are a bunch of loose canons, who are not intimidated by the rules or regulations imposed upon them and at times risk crossing the line of legality.

On the first of May 1947, the bandit Salvatore Giuliano conducted a raid to the mountain pass Portella della Ginestra, with a view to capturing Sicily's most prominent communist, Giacomo Licausi. What actually happened was a regular massacre, leaving fourteen people dead and more than thirty wounded. In 1951, about a year after Giulano's violent death, his men are tried in Viterbo. Unconvinced by the official version, Gaspare Pasciotta's lawyer, decides to travel to Sicily and starts investigating the facts.