In January 1943 the German army, afraid of an Allied invasion of the Balkans, launched a great offensive against Yugoslav Partisans in Western Bosnia. The only way out for Partisan forces and thousands of refugees was the bridge on the river Neretva.

The headquarters of the Marshal Tito's Liberation Army are surrounded by Axis forces. The Partisans have no choice but to fight their way out of the encirclement and face the enemy on the plains of Sutjeska.

A young and shy girl Celestina arrives from her small home village to Rome to become a housemaid. Her inexperience and naivety causes her to change her employers quite frequently. As she is moving from one family to another she makes friends with other Roman maids and falls desperately in love with a handsome plumber Fernando. But Fernando isn't telling Celestina that he is already engaged to another woman.

Two factory workers living in Northern Italy form a romantic connection. The woman, torn between the freedoms of the North and her traditional Sicilian values, slowly allows herself to love...

Sicily, Fascist Italy, 1925. Dictator Benito Mussolini appoints Cesare Mori, a man as tough as he is honest, as the new police prefect of Palermo and entrusts him with the arduous task of putting an end to the Mafia, a sinister criminal organization that has sown terror on the island for centuries.

Sicily, 1865. Two peasants, Gramigna and his father are tricked by Baron Nardò and robbed of their field, which then the baron lets to Assunta, her daughter Gemma and her fiancé Ramarro. Determined to take revenge, Gramigna begins to hunt down Nardò's complicit mediators. Unbeknownst to Gramigna, Gemma, to escape her arranged marriage, goes after him. Love and violence will follow all till their desperate ends.

1996 film by Carlo Lizzani

During the winter of 1944, the partisans stationed in the Ligurian Apennines must go to a factory in Genoa, in order to pick up a delivery of weapons. Meanwhile, there's a strike in the city and the Nazis are trying to suppress it violently. The factory becomes the scene of fighting between the Germans and the partisans but the latter, aided by the workers, will be able to get the better.

In Naples at the end of the 19th century, Nicola Bellizzi dreams of becoming a lawyer. However, when he seeks the reason that people are reluctant to help him in his goals, he discovers that some of his blood relations are high-ranking members of the Mafia. He tries to break away from his family obligations, but falls into a life of crime and violence.

In 1880 Rome, a patriarch closes the family bakery. His ambitious daughter-in-law manipulates her brothers-in-law to prevent their father's remarriage, securing her inheritance.