The endearing efforts of a divorced, simple baker to capture the attentions of a bourgeois society woman.

1770. Young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is hosted in a villa near Bologna, where he has to graduate. There he gets in touch with “normal” boys, falls in love for the first time and tries to escape his destiny of young genius.

Italy, 1914. Two teachers take their pupils for a school outing from Bologna to Florence.

During the Middle Ages, a traveling executioner hires an apprentice to learn the finer points of torture and execution, and a young girl is given by her parents to a Catholic convent.

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.