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