During the Middle Ages, a traveling executioner hires an apprentice to learn the finer points of torture and execution, and a young girl is given by her parents to a Catholic convent.

The film covers the last year of Pier Giorgio Frassati life, son of the family that owned the newspaper La Stampa, who lived between 1901 and 1925 and was beatified in 1990.

Set in Italy in 1946 just after World War 2, the film explores the lives and emotions of a group of patients who are terminally ill and confined to an isolated sanatorium.