A man with cognitive problems lives and works in a hospice. One day an American banker discovers that the man is his son.

Giuliano, kindergarten teacher, goes to his ex's birthday, meets Liliana and falls in love with her.

Mario, a tram-driver, and Silvio, a banker, make friends in the group of participants in a survival training course.

In 1943, during the war, Francesca, widowed, moves with her three daughters to her country house, to get away from the bombing of Bologna. In the villa she finds her childhood friends and her old love Guido, who has not forgotten her. Francesca has a passion for everything that comes from America, like music and cinema. She even tells her daughters that her husband who died in the war would actually leave for the USA, where he would live.

One of the key factors in Italian unification was the overthrow in 1860 of Francesco, the King of Naples and the two Sicilies, who went into elegant but impoverished exile in Rome with his Queen, Maria Sofia. This seriocomic drama follows the deposed royals as they adapt to their new lives. The former king has recognized the political finality of his deposition, but his queen has taken to traveling in men's clothing all over Italy trying to foment an uprising to restore them to the throne. She is also frantic to have a baby, an heir, but the king has become celibate as a kind of homage to his beloved mother; he spends all his time lobbying the Vatican to get her declared a saint.