Giacomo Puccini, the son of a Tuscan organist, achieves world-wide recognition as a composer of operas and dies from throat cancer in the middle of an artistic crisis, at the age of just sixty-six.

Puccini

Razzullo is a scrivener hired by the Emperor Augusto to take a census of all the Empire citizens, who is keeping on looking for stratagems which allow him to satisfy his hunger. On his way he runs into Sarchiapone, his looney countryman, barber and violin scraper, on the run because he has cheated a gangster. They handle together many vicissitudes in order to earn some money to buy something to eat. In the meanwhile, Mary and Joseph are travelling looking for a place in which waiting for Baby Jesus' birth, pursued by Plutone, Lord of underworld, and the four little devils in his service.

La cantata dei pastori

Sergio driving a taxi in a white Naples overflowing sadness and garbage. Pouring rain leads her clients through the city trying to process the death of his brother, who started ten years earlier for Tibet and never returned. A pop singer, a recycler of fragments of life, a radio announcer, an old uncle, alternate seats on its bearing, each in its own way, a trace of his brother loved. Stubborn not to go over and get lost in an endless race, Sergio is overwhelmed by memories and the music produced in pairs with Alfredo, which in Buddhism and in its foundations had found the strength to cope with the disease. Those notes that he believed buried and laid to always return overbearing and demanding a soundboard that resonate and express his being sound. Putting his hand on the piano, Sergio Alfredo feel again, giving the past with the present and realizing itself in the feeling.