Ascanio Celestini

In a despairing, fatalistic Rome, Nicola finds himself flirting with the city’s dark side. Drinking too much and living among drifters, petty criminals and anxious immigrants, Nicola becomes entwined in an insurance scam that leads him further into a netherworld he may never escape.

Nicola is a man who has spent much of his life in a mental institution, though not always as a patient. Nicola's mother suffered from mental illness, and when young Nicola grew old enough to understand some of her stranger behavior as well as the family's other dark secrets, a few of the adults around him preferred to suggest he was disturbed like his mother, and he was encouraged to visit an asylum not far from his home. As an adult, Nicola has spent enough time around people who have a tenuous connection with reality that he has a superficial resemblance to them, and has developed a strange set of imaginary friends to go along with his eccentric real-life companions and the woman he loves from afar, Marinella.

Garage owner Angelo and big-time film producer Alberto find themselves occupying neighbouring beds in a Rome hospital after suffering heart attacks. Alberto is a gregarious joker - and chain smoker - who has a strong effect on the impressionable Angelo. However, as one of the men's condition deteriorates, the other becomes more deeply involved in his personal life.

Accio and Manrico are working class brothers who live in Italy in the 1960s. While his brother becomes drawn into left-wing politics, Accio, the hotheaded younger brother, is taken under the wing of a market trader and while under his influence, joins the Fascist party. Accio ("Bully") is a nickname he is proud of because it makes him seem tough. Manrico and their sister Violetta are alarmed to hear their brother listening to Benito Mussolini's speeches in his room. Manrico often physically torments his brother, including stuffing his head in the barrel under the drain pipe of their house.

Monologue about the Ardeatine massacre, a mass killing carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome against the SS Police Regiment Bozen.