In the Tiburtino III neighbourhood, in the outer suburbs of Rome, a small asteroid falls from the sky. In the following days, almost everyone in the suburb starts behaving inexplicably oddly: they all suck AA batteries. An improbable group of young characters finds out that many have been infected by some parasites and the aliens intend to conquer the whole world.

It is the end of World War I and the young Italian soldiers are making their way back to San Giovanni Rotondo, a land of poverty, with a tradition of violence and submission to the iron-clad rule of the church and its wealthy landowners. Families are desperate, the men are broken, albeit victorious. Padre Pio also arrives, at a remote Capuchin monastery, to begin his ministry, evoking an aura of charisma, saintliness and epic visions of Jesus, Mary and the Devil himself. The eve of the first free elections in Italy sets the stage for a massacre with a metaphorical dimension: an apocalyptic event that changes the course of history.

In a dystopian Rome, a law is enforced which does not allow immigrant families to have more than three children. If a fourth is to be expected, he or she must be born, however, one of them must then be killed, giving the females priority for sacrifice. Zoe, Iris and Clio are three sisters, but one of them will soon be killed. Tria is a tragic story, suspended between life and death, set in the home of a family that has accepted to sacrifice its integrity in order to carve out a place in the world. A dystopian story, yet not so far from what could happen, or what, somewhere else, may have already happened.

Rome. Claudio is 15 and wants to be part of the clique. He admires the 18-year-old leader Lauro. If he wants to fit in, he has to lose his little boy smell and learn to smell like a man.

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

Chronicles the rise of power of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in a history of a country that surrendered to dictatorship.