In the summer of his nineteenth year, Giulio has decided not to go away: he will spend his vacation at home, helping his parents with their work in the vegetable garden. In the house next door, empty for some time, arrives Lia, a twenty-year-old girl. Giulio would like to get to know her, but she is sullen and introverted. One day Giulio is swimming in the lake and Lia plays at drowning him. Giulio is a regular guy, sensitive and polite to a fault. Attracted to her, he starts thinking about her day and night. Lia initiates him into strange and increasingly dangerous "games." The girl won't talk about herself though. She has told him she came alone to spend her vacation in the old family home, where she hadn't been since she was a child. But Lia has secrets to keep and won't let anyone set foot in the old and abandoned house.

The past interlaces with the present: the discovery of a mysterious yellowed photograph depicting a little girl will lead Christian and Jewish students to search for the truth. They undertake a journey through the memory of a painful past that is hard to forget, such as the memory of the raid on the Jewish ghetto of Rome.

Rome, 1990. The night Italy's national football team is eliminated from the World Cup by Argentina on penalty kicks, a well-known film producer is found dead in the Tiber river. The main suspects for the murder are three young aspiring screenwriters, who–promptly taken to the police–start to tell their version of the story.

The Manzoni High School in Milan is the worst in Italy. When the percentage of those promoted falls to 12%, it's time for the last resort: to entrust the classes to the worst of the available teachers.

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.