In 1950s Sicily, con artist Joe Moretti does screen tests for the big studios, accepting money or favours for his efforts. A young illiterate novitiate named Beata desperately wants to change her life and falls for him; belatedly, he realizes his feelings for her. However, their love affair is doomed when he's arrested.

A Sicilian family deals with the arrival of a group of immigrants on their island.

1965, a train with a variety of passengers is heading north when it makes an unexpected stop. On the other track, heading south, a train passes with the same passengers 20 years later.

The three days power vacuum in a Sicilian village shortly after the American landing in Sicily in July 1943.

Valentino and Salvo, unemployed and in search of fortune and recommendation, leave Palermo for Valentino’s home town, Monteforte, where they will try to survive the Italian crisis by opening some sort of hospice.

While looking for new tenants for his seaside villa, surrounded by a big garden, Andrea Ricoli, a 50-years old architect, meets Rossana, a newly 40-years old, anaesthesiologist at the local hospital, and married to Riccardo, ten years younger than her: he's an aspiring writer, temporarily employed as a salesman at a local shoe store. During an eventful New Year's Eve, Andrea introduces Riccardo to a Maghreb restaurant owner - who is interested in restoring an attic apartment - and his lovely sister Hikma. Months go by. Andrea discovers that Hikma is pregnant with Riccardo's child, while she's struggling with her old-fashioned, fundamentalist brother's mentality. He offers to help the couple and let them stay with him in his villa. Teaching him how to care for his garden, the young Hikma reminds Andrea of his wife Sofia, who passed away right there four years earlier, in unclear circumstances...