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.

Stefania works in a bookshop. Shortly before closing for summer holidays, Andrea, who was left behind by his fiancée, enters the store.

In 1985 in Milan Michele Croce is now in prison and decides to answer the magistrate's questions, telling how in the seventies he became the ruler of the Milanese underworld.

Claudio is a construction worker living in the outskirts of Rome. He's happily married and his wife is pregnant with their third child. However, a dramatic event comes to upset this simple and happy life.

An American horror writer, haunted by childhood nightmares, moves to an old mansion in Italy with her husband and young son only to discover the nightmares were real.

The movie tells the little stories of a group of families who live in the same building in Rome as seen from the eyes of Sandrino, a little kid who is awaiting for a total eclipse of the sun, that really happened during summer of '61, and it was was fully visible from Italy. He sees his family life, a young girl who is about to marry a man she doesn't love, an old man who has just died and whose relatives fight for his inheritance, a blind trumpet player who hopes to recover, his little friends...

During the 20 months before Italy's liberation from Fascism, a group of university students trade empty rhetoric for action by joining the Partisans into the mountains of Nazi-occupied northern Italy. There, group leader Gigi falls in love with his best friend's girl. As the Resistance struggle continues, some of the "little teachers" are killed, and the brutal reality of war leaves its mark on their youthful idealism.

Giulia’s is a poised world, made of rigour and sacred texts, which fiercely excludes those who do not belong to it. Libero's world is the world of all the others, of those who make mistakes, who fend for themselves looking for another chance and who love unconditionally. When Giulia meets Libero, she realizes she can have another destiny, one she will have to choose and build.

In Perugia, Luca, a lawyer investigates mysterious facts that happened in the city and even got emotionally involved. The rather complicated cases are those of a jealous murderess girl, of a surgeon who kills a colleague who had helped him to face a dangerous intervention to become a woman, of a plumber who is suspected of murdering an heiress while the real guilty is the nephew who would like to take possession of a huge fortune.