The story takes place in Palermo and it follows the story of the young Arturo Giammarresi, who wishes to become a journalist and has loved Flora since he was ten years old. His awkward attempts to conquer her heart run parallel to his (and his city's) slow realisation of the existence of Sicilian Mafia. In the end, the movie is mostly a homage paid to the policemen and the magistrates who fought and gave their lives between the late 1970s and 1992, heroes of legality that were martyred in the attempt to dismantle the Sicilian Mafia.