The tormented life of Dante Alighieri, from solitary childhood to death in exile, seen through Giovanni Boccaccio’s journey to rehabilitate his memory.

In 1950s Italy, a government official arrives in a rural town to investigate a grisly child murder. The culprit is a young boy who claims to have acted in order to kill the Devil himself.

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.

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.