A lonely schoolteacher has a strange experience on her walking holiday. It haunts her and threatens to wreck her growing romance with a colleague.

Maurice Flitcroft, a dreamer and unrelenting optimist, managed to gain entry to The British Open Golf Championship qualifying in 1976 and subsequently shot the worst round in Open history, becoming a folk hero in the process.

It is Christmas 1908 in Messina, one of the richest merchant cities of the Mediterranean. Peter, the 13 year-old son of a rich English family is notorious for his cruelty to children, animals and servants. One night he is ambushed and wakes up in a coffin underground in the city's Gothic cemetery, buried in retaliation for his callousness by a servant boy from his mother's estate. When a powerful earthquake razes Messina to the ground, Peter is trapped and his whereabouts are forgotten. Until a century later an English archaeologist and his daughter arrive in the city.