Roberto Latini

Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.

Nicola is a man who has spent much of his life in a mental institution, though not always as a patient. Nicola's mother suffered from mental illness, and when young Nicola grew old enough to understand some of her stranger behavior as well as the family's other dark secrets, a few of the adults around him preferred to suggest he was disturbed like his mother, and he was encouraged to visit an asylum not far from his home. As an adult, Nicola has spent enough time around people who have a tenuous connection with reality that he has a superficial resemblance to them, and has developed a strange set of imaginary friends to go along with his eccentric real-life companions and the woman he loves from afar, Marinella.

Love, business, anxieties, friendships, feuds, and resentments paint the picture of the main story, that of a group of criminals who for nearly fifteen years, from 1977 to 1992, cherished an illusion: that of conquering Rome. The Lebanese, Freddo, Dandi, Patrizia, and Commissioner Scialoja are some of the characters inspired by the true story of the Magliana gang. As stated by Aldo Grasso, the first season of the series gives more space to the crime scene, that is, the criminal exploits of the Magliana gang, while the second season delves deeper into the "behind the scenes" of the crime: thus, the gang's repositioning after a key plot event, and the effects and questions this has provoked in the protagonists' consciences.