When the most important friend in her life seems to have disappeared without a trace, Elena Greco, a now-elderly woman immersed in a house full of books, turns on her computer and starts writing the story of their friendship.

In the late 1980s, Amedeo Letizia, a young 20 something Italian, leaves his hometown of Casal di Principe to pursue a career in acting in Rome. While he's making his debut, his younger brother Paolo is kidnapped by armed men. Amedeo comes back, this return being an infernal descent into his past and his region's contradictions.

A Camorra boss fakes his own death in order to start a new life elsewhere with his family, but a nurse happens to see him alive and well after the funeral. A hitman is promptly sent to get rid of her, only to find out that she's his first and unforgotten love. He decides to protect her, becoming himself a target.

The police infiltrates an unemployed classically-trained musician into a wedding band in order to drive out an elusive Camorra boss.

On the small island where she lives and works, Arianna is preparing to ring in the new year and ring out the old. But that night might not only be the end of the year, it might also be the end of her relationship with Nanni, a beekeeper from the city. The looming separation remains a mystery for the woman: she doesn’t understand the reasons for it and fruitless hours have been spent talking it over with evasive Nanni, who seems to consider their relationship an obstacle to his freedom. But when faced with another woman’s pain, Arianna manages to find the strength within herself to carry on.

Set in 1970s Naples, bullied nine year-old Peppino is watching the world around him as his extended dysfunctional family change. Psychedelic flower power and hippie love is threatening the old traditional southern Italian family. Dad is having an affair and Mom has taken to her bed with depression. Super-mod brother and sister Titina and Salvatore take the boy under their wings, introducing him to demonstrations and love-ins, whilst caped superhero Gennaro visits Peppino even after being knocked down and killed by the number 12 bus. It is the imaginary appearances of this older superman cousin that help the nine-year-old navigate the complicated adult world.

1828. In the wake of the repression of revolutionary movements in Southern Italy, three young friends join Giuseppe Mazzini's republican and unificationist cause. Their idealism will clash with the inevitable disillusionment as they grow apart over the decades.

Italian police inspector Coliandro — an ignorant, boorish, but fundamentally kind-hearted oaf, whose entire worldview is informed by American cop movies — protects the good citizens of Bologna, routinely saving the day and foiling the plans of evildoers of all sorts by a combination of dumb luck and genuine bravery, while always falling hopelessly in love with the woman at the center of the case.

Although this sounds like a weekend like many others, in the Prior house the atmosphere is rather tense because of some nervousness on the part of individual members of the family, especially the father, Peppino, who gets angry with anyone who happens to shoot: with their children, Juliana and Roberto, and his sister, aunt Meme. Meanwhile, his wife Rosa is dedicated to the preparation of the sauce, which she will serve for Sunday's lunch, to which she invited the neighbors, the accountant Ianniello and his wife.

A group of actors meet with little money in a unofficial theatre in Naples' Spanish Boroughs. Director's plan is to travel to Sarajevo, still under siege, to stage a classic Eschilus' play about civil war in Tebe. While they rehearse in the theatre cast members come and go and another kind of war goes on every day in nearby streets of old Naples.

Naples, 1959. Pure Mathematics professor Renato Caccioppoli, Bakunin's grandson, is a tortured soul. Recently discharged from the psychiatric hospital, left by his wife, and increasingly disillusioned with academia and the Communist Party, he lives his last days with painful detachment.