Depressed magistrate Damiano Fortezza relocates from Milan to a small town in Campania, where the three Fontana sisters, owners of a chain of incinerators, dominate. The youngest, Eugenia, is about to marry a well-known crook Fortezza has to prosecute. However, he ends up falling in love with Eugenia and questioning the priorities of his job.

The housing shortage means that two spouses have to continue living under the same roof despite the ongoing legal separation. Incidents and misunderstandings to no end, but the couple's son will take care of fixing everything.

Sergio driving a taxi in a white Naples overflowing sadness and garbage. Pouring rain leads her clients through the city trying to process the death of his brother, who started ten years earlier for Tibet and never returned. A pop singer, a recycler of fragments of life, a radio announcer, an old uncle, alternate seats on its bearing, each in its own way, a trace of his brother loved. Stubborn not to go over and get lost in an endless race, Sergio is overwhelmed by memories and the music produced in pairs with Alfredo, which in Buddhism and in its foundations had found the strength to cope with the disease. Those notes that he believed buried and laid to always return overbearing and demanding a soundboard that resonate and express his being sound. Putting his hand on the piano, Sergio Alfredo feel again, giving the past with the present and realizing itself in the feeling.

Sarah is a black South African girl raised in a middle-class family that sent her to the best schools. She has a deformity in one leg, but her parents encouraged her to take swimming lessons anyway. Her coach (a half-crazy drunk) realizes Sarah has an iron will and, against the federation's wishes, enters her in the extremely tough Capri-Napoli race.

A love story between two women in the Naples outskirts, a universe so far away from the glare of modernity, turbid, rural, completely naked in its ugliness and sorrow, where "people are talking".

Razzullo is a scrivener hired by the Emperor Augusto to take a census of all the Empire citizens, who is keeping on looking for stratagems which allow him to satisfy his hunger. On his way he runs into Sarchiapone, his looney countryman, barber and violin scraper, on the run because he has cheated a gangster. They handle together many vicissitudes in order to earn some money to buy something to eat. In the meanwhile, Mary and Joseph are travelling looking for a place in which waiting for Baby Jesus' birth, pursued by Plutone, Lord of underworld, and the four little devils in his service.

Professor Lipari teaches in a public school and is in a full-on existential crisis. He has no faith in himself and in the possibility of changing the world for the better. At school, a former student of his who is also a teacher will change his attitude.

Naples, 1959. Pure Mathematics professor Renato Caccioppoli, Bakunin's grandson, is a tortured soul. Recently discharged from the psychiatric hospital, left by his wife, and increasingly disillusioned with academia and the Communist Party, he lives his last days with painful detachment.