It's 1348. The plague has brutally hit Florence. A group of then young people, seven women and three men, rebel against the feeling of death that is about to swallow them. They flee the city and find refuge in an abandoned villa in the Tuscan hills. Here, between moral doubts and the tasks needed to survive, they kill time by telling each other stories until they will decide to return. The stories are varied - tragic, bizarre, funny or erotic - but common and central to all of them is the female presence.
"Tomorrow, I won't be alive anymore," Francesco tersely tells his family, gathered for dinner. He has decided to commit suicide because he can't bear living without his wife, who died three months earlier, and can't imagine the idea of getting used to the pain. After the initial shock, his parents and his sisters try to make him change his mind.
United by an uncompromising struggle as members of the infamous 1970s far-left terrorist group Prima Linea, fugitive couple Sergio and Susanna have become increasingly alienated from the real world. Their luck runs out when Susanna is captured and thrown in jail. Putting his life on the line, Sergio embarks on a radical plan... Loosely based on the memoir by Prima Linea's 'commander' Sergio Segio.
Italy, 1968. Aspiring actor Nicola enrolls in the police to pay for his rent, ending up undercover among university students protesting the government, the Vietnam war and the strict mores of the time. He befriends Laura, a bourgeois girl dreaming of a better world, and Libero, a working-class radical leader, complicating his mission...
Giuseppe Tornatore traces three generations of a Sicilian family in in the Sicilian town of Bagheria (known as Baarìa in the local Sicilian dialect), from the 1930s to the 1980s, to tell the story of the loves, dreams and delusions of an unusual community.