A quartet of stories unfold across four holidays as family members, friends and colleagues face hard decisions, career setbacks and life-changing events.

A couple in crisis after the birth of their first son rekindles their love during a trip to Norway.

The Merchant (Harvey Keitel) is a Westerner. A merchant dealing in precious stones from Afganistan and Turkey. He's above suspicion. In truth, the "Stone Merchant" is a Christian convert into Islam. He's rich, cultured, fascinating. Leda (Jane March) is a successful woman who works as Head of the Public Relations for a big company. She's married to Alceo, a professor at the Sapienza University, specialized in the history of terrorist movements. Alceo is on a wheel chair. He lost his legs in the attack to the American Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Shahid is a terrorist. Now he's planning an attack along the English Channel. Their lives, their destinies cross in Turkey, where Leda and Alceo are on holiday. And the plot will go on to Rome and Turin till the epilogue of the attack on the ferry boat.

In the Tiber sports club, Alberto, a ruthless property developer, the cynical surgeon who makes thirty million dollars after a prostate operation, the actor exhausted by failure and the failed salesman who sells caviar by discounting prices and who tries to make up for continuous overdrafts in the bank, meet. There is also the starlet with a Venetian accent and the hateful scion with a Ferrari, the waiter who dreams of being the scion and the jeweler who loses his house, wife and wealth because of the hot Spanish woman.

A man who has just robbed a small bank holds four people hostage in a bakery after escaping a police chase. He begins a tense negotiation with the police, who have set up headquarters in a post office overlooking the street where the bakery is located. The situation is made difficult and comically bizarre by the nature of the hostages who just so happen to be in the bakery at the time of the raid.

Aspiring writer Tommaso makes a living by penning the self-help column of a women's magazine. One day he receives a letter from a reader asking for advice on how to break up with her man: it is none other than Zoe, his partner of ten years, unaware of his pseudonymous side job. Tommaso can't believe his eyes and answers her in private to learn more.

1960. Vincenzo is an enterprising and determined young man who, at the age of just eleven, decides to run away from a small village in Basilicata, abandoning his family to take refuge in the capital with his shoemaker brother. Against the backdrop of an Italy in the midst of its economic boom, he begins working in a bar and graduates from elementary school. Everything seems to be going well, but a sad discovery turns his life upside down. Vincenzo seeks further redemption for himself and his brother by opening a business and thus consolidating his social standing in the capital, but always with the regret of not having his family of origin, especially his brother Giovanni, close by. He returns to his hometown as a grown man, to the bedside of his dying father, bringing with him the memories of a child, a man who was a winner for his people, but deeply defeated and a victim of regret for a life lived halfway.

The guests of a birthday party divulge their intimate side. The bathroom mirror affords us with a view of the personal catastrophes of the party guests.