Il sogno del maratoneta

The movie tells the little stories of a group of families who live in the same building in Rome as seen from the eyes of Sandrino, a little kid who is awaiting for a total eclipse of the sun, that really happened during summer of '61, and it was was fully visible from Italy. He sees his family life, a young girl who is about to marry a man she doesn't love, an old man who has just died and whose relatives fight for his inheritance, a blind trumpet player who hopes to recover, his little friends...

Maria Celeste is a widow that lives in a retirement home. She is stingy, unpleasant, solitary and looks down on people. Every Sunday Maria sits alone on the park bench, though she tells everyone that she goes to her son's to cook a lovely meal. But on that Sunday, while dozing on the bench, a young girl places a ten month old baby in her arms and runs away leaving Maria stunned and confused. Finally the girl comes back and they start to know each other. The girl asks Maria to take the baby for a second, crosses the street and a tram hits her. She dies without a reason on a warm summer morning. Maria is alone with the baby. Her Maria Celeste's story begins.

Don Matteo is a thoroughly ordinary Catholic priest with an extraordinary ability to read people and solve crimes. He’s a parish priest who never met an unjustly accused person he didn’t want to help.

This is a true story about forty Jewish children on their way to Palestine, who were blocked by the German and Italian occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. Before finding a haven at Villa Emma in Nonantola in northern Italy, where they arrived on June 17, 1942, the children spent several adventurous months in Slovenia, caught up in the ongoing fight between the partisans and the Italian army. In April 1943, another 33 children, some from the Balkans, others from France, joined the original group. All were orphans who had lost their parents in concentration camps and had subsequently been smuggled out of Germany by Recha Freier, a well-known Zionist. The group ranged in age from six to twenty one and settled in at Villa Emma with their chaperones and teachers, Josef Indig, Marco Schoky and the pianist Boris Jochverdson.

Four waiters and a cook working at a seaside restaurant hate one another but still keep working together for lack of better opportunities.