Palermo, Sicily, 1984. Examining magistrate Giovanni Falcone allies with Tomasso Buscetta, a former mobster, to defeat the clan of Corleone, the ruthless Mafia faction that rules Cosa Nostra with an iron hand, cruelly eliminating all those who dare to oppose its immense power: other criminals, policemen, judges, even innocent civilians. One of them wants revenge, the other wants justice. But only one can survive such an unequal fight.
In this highly symbolic political allegory, Averill is traveling through a troubled countryside amid rumors of war to visit his father. He reaches a train station in a city which is paralyzed by a transportation strike and is forced to take lodgings in a bizarre, unattractive town populated by seemingly malformed individuals. After a while, he begins to try to woo a much older woman, and symbolic images of entrapment, imprisonment and erotic enticement mark his adventures in this regard.
Set during the height of Spanish Inquisition. The beautiful and kind-hearted Maria is arrested as a witch when she inadvertently cries out in horror at the public whipping of a child. As Maria’s husband Antonio tries to save her, Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, determines to punish Maria with torture for the desire she inflames in him. Loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe's classic short story.
Before finally entering the afterlife, the dead spend a period in a limbo from which they depart only when, among the living, there is no one who remembers them. Under the care of the salacious Domenico the visitors of a small cemetery recount how they arrived at eternal peace.
John the Baptist, the prophet of Israel, is imprisoned by Herod, governor of Judea for protesting Herod's marriage to his brother's wife. Jealousies rage and Herod's step-daughter and niece Salome seduces Herod by means of a torrid dance to give her the head of the prophet - but then tries to save the life of the man she has thus condemned. Updated to a WWII setting
