La Periferia d'Acciaio

Parthenope, born in the sea near Naples in 1950, is beautiful, enigmatic, and intelligent. She is shamelessly courted by many. However, beauty comes at a cost.

The rise and fall of a Neapolitan criminal clan through the story of a boss and his family, divided between the aspiration for a bourgeois life and the deep impulses of oppression. Thirty years of history of one of the most beautiful and discussed cities in the world, the dream of a boy who is overwhelmed by the desire for power as an end in itself, to become the nightmare of a man and those who live next to him.

Pietro and Eleonora, both avid gardeners, are strangers who only meet because their two terraces are close to each other. The relationship that grows between them helps them to alleviate the pain each feels over something secret and very serious, a pain both try to hide from themselves and those around them. In this limbo they inhabit, the two make a stab at finding happiness together, until their paths diverge once more.

A court takes 9-year-old Mario away from his abusive family and entrusts him to a childless couple. For the three of them, living together is difficult and often painful, since they come from two different worlds. To cope with loneliness and displacement, Mario creates his own world, where he meets Schad Sky, an imaginary friend.

Three chapters. Three generations. Giggino always running around, restaurant poet, small street thief. 50 years old. His father Antonio, a pensioner from Italsider and nostalgic of the old factory days and what represented. Expert and promulgator of Maradona’s deeds. 80 years old, maybe more. Finally, Marco, a deli shop boy, chasing a future but not knowing how. 18 years old. Around them a jungle of a very populated neighborhood, Bagnoli, in a great city, Naples. Where purpose was lost and a new one was not yet found.

Filumena has lived for years with a wealthy pastry chef. She forces him to marry her, but he soon asks to annul the marriage. She then reveals that one of her children is his, making him obsessed to know which one.

Spring 2020. In the midst of the pandemic, Diego has just turned 18. Although he's named after his father's idol, Maradona, he doesn't really like football, nor lives in Naples anymore. After his mother's death, he moved with his father Franco in a Roman suburb, but he's having an hard time integrating and seems to get better along with the African immigrants living next door than with his new classmates. Things change after Tea, a unconventional young woman who's guarding an important secret, bursts into his and Franco's lives. Their forced coexistence will fuel Diego's coming-of-age journey.

At Disperata, a small town in Southern Italy, the melancholy mayor Filippo Pisanelli feels terribly unfit for his role. Only a love of poetry and his passion for the literature lessons he gives to prison inmates admit a chink of light into his general state of depression. In jail he meets Pati, a small-time criminal from his own town. Pati and his brother Angiolino were dreaming of becoming the mafia bosses of Capo di Leuca, but the encounter with art changes everything and an unusual friendship between the three men will lead them to make courageous choices.