Samuel, a boy who lives with his mother Elena in Villa dei Laghi, an isolated manor surrounded by woods, feels trapped in the family routine, growing up seemingly protected, but unsatisfied and restless.

The apparently quiet lives of four milanese bourgeois couples become intertwined

Don Matteo is a thoroughly ordinary Catholic priest with an extraordinary ability to read people and solve crimes. He’s a parish priest who never met an unjustly accused person he didn’t want to help.

The rumpled owner of a dry-cleaning firm joins forces with a nun to care for an abandoned baby.

Fugitive convict Aldo seizes a car, taking policeman Giacomo and civilian Giovanni hostages. While chased by the police all over Italy, they will eventually become friends.

Director Maurizio Nichetti is invited on TV to introduce a screening of his neo-realist classic 'The Icicle Thief'. He is horrified to discover that his black-and-white tale of life in poverty is constantly interrupted by garish color commercials, and even more horrified when a power cut in the studio causes film and commercials to mix up – a glamorous model finds herself in the arms of an unemployed pauper, while his wife finds herself in consumers' heaven. Nichetti has to break into the film to try to sort everything out.

The young priest Father Giulio returns to Rome, his hometown, after a long pilgrimage. Don Giulio hopes to live peacefully with his family and his friends, but discovers that many of them are depressed or frustrated, and some suicidal.

Maurizio wakes up after sleeping for twenty years and goes to live with his cousin Carlina, who shares her apartment with two other women: one an actress, the other unemployed.