Emily Delahunty is an eccentric British romance novelist who lives in Umbria in central Italy. One day while travelling, the train she is on is bombed by terrorists. After she wakes up in a hospital, she invites three of the other survivors of the disaster to stay at her Italian villa for recuperation. Of these are The General, a retired British Army veteran, Werner, a young German man, and Aimee, a young American girl who has now become mute after her parents were both killed in the explosion.

Four tales unfold in the Eternal City: While vacationing in Rome, architect John encounters a young man whose romantic woes remind him of a painful incident from his own youth; retired opera director Jerry discovers a mortician with an amazing voice, and he seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate his own flagging career; a young couple have separate romantic interludes; a spotlight shines on an ordinary man.

An entertaining, somewhat madcap, unbiased exploration into a variety of interpersonal relationships which are wavering in the face of changing societal mores and diverse and challenging sexual preference choices.

Davide, a city tour guide, leads his faithful tourists into a bizarre and surreal excursion through Rome and its famous landmarks that have witnessed the reasons for his broken heart.

A nerdy film student and lifelong voyeur begins to believe that two lovely young strangers may have conspired to commit a brutal murder.

Policewoman Anna Mari is forced to play a dangerous game with the title serial killer. If she loses, she witnesses the maniac's tortured victims having their throats cut in explicit close-up detail via webcam. She teams up with British cop John Brennan to find out the identity of the murderer.

In Italy, a woman fears her sister has been kidnapped; Inspector Enzo Avolfi fears it's worse. They team up to rescue her from a sadistic killer known only as Yellow.

Two couples are enjoying their summer at the beach, but when the grown son of one couple arrives, it surprisingly stirs something in the husband of the other couple, will the forbidden feelings end badly?

In a respectable suburb made up of row houses, Luca Attorre — a freelance journalist who struggles to get his features published in the papers — is unable to maintain Susi, a ballerina reduced to teaching dance to overweight women, and Lucilla, their quiet and imaginative six-year- old daughter who suffers from severe bronchial asthma. They are helped economically by Pierpaolo, Luca’s seventeen-year-old son from a previous relationship. Pierpaolo lives in an Art Nouveau house with his mother and grandfather, an important trial lawyer of cases linked to politics who rakes in several million euros a year. In the setting of a magnificent and incomprehensible Rome, both a good mother and a bad one, Mary Ann, a deeply Catholic student of art history from Ireland, au pair for the little Lucilla, is caught in the middle.

Cristina Comencini defines the film as a "thriller of the soul." It's the story of a woman who returns to Italy from the US to attend the funeral of her late father, an American admiral living in Naples. Here she meets a man who seems to know too many things about her.