After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lives of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family take different directions, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.

Matriarch Adele's death prompts an unexpected and often incendiary reunion for the large Gori family – unaware that inside her coffin lie also the stolen goods of a robbery by her son Danilo.

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.