Franco and Ciccio are small time horse thieves who get involved with the bandit, El Diablo, and two former members of his gang who are after his gold. Fortunately two pretty, sharp shooting saloon girls come to the bumbling duo's rescue.

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.

When his destituite widowed sister-in-law—whom he had never stopped harbouring feelings for—and her ne'er-do-well son come to live with him after World War II, a mentally-ill farmer who spends all his time destroying unexploded ordnance scattered across the countryside finds a new purpose in his lonely life.

Shunned by his church, a seminary student takes refuge with an excommunicated priest who teaches him wizardry and black magic.

In late summer 1991, three Italians reach a hunting reserve in Croatia with a station wagon. They go to deer, but, unaware of what's in store for months, they do not decipher the enigmatic signs that surround them. One of the three is suddendly wounded in the knee by a bullet of unknown provenance, and they end up in a hotel targeted by snipers night and day.

In an operation aimed at hitting the mafia, the Sicilian police hunt down several assassins to trace their bosses. The hunted, with the help of the mafia, try to escape from the island.