A ballet dancer is late for an audition for a show inspired by Plato's Allegory of the Cave. She arrives with her seven-year-old son, Jay, and begs the director to give her a chance.

After growing up in Switzerland, 13-year-old Marta returns to a city in southern Italy with her mother and older sister. Independent and inquisitive, she joins a catechism class at a local church. However, the games and religious pop songs she encounters there do not nearly satisfy her interest in faith. Struggling to find her place, Marta pushes the boundaries of the class, the priest, and the church.

During WWII, in the days leading up to Christmas, a woman arrives at an Italian Catholic boarding school for orphaned girls with a large cake and a plea for them to pray for her boyfriend, who is having an affair.

Just out of jail, rumpled English archaeologist Arthur reconnects with his wayward crew of tombaroli accomplices – a happy-go-lucky collective of itinerant grave-robbers who survive by looting Etruscan tombs and fencing the ancient treasures they dig up.

Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.