Blending chronicle and fantasy, epic drama and elegy, the film revisits the massacre at the San Miniato Cathedral that claimed the lives of fifty-five people. Until 2004 the responsibility for the massacre was falsely attributed to the Germans.
San Miniato, a small town in Tuscany, on the night of the Feast of St. Lawrence in the closing days of World War II. The Germans, retreating from the village, tell an old bishop to gather the villagers in the cathedral, promising their safety. A group of villagers uncertainly obeys the bishop, but another group leaves their homes to look for liberating American soldiers rumoured to be on the outskirts. Only a handful of them make it out of the cathedral alive, scarred for life by this experience.
"In this film we identified with the little girl who recounts and expresses a fundamental experience of ours, lived in the beauty and tragedy of the war of '44, on those hills, in our little town of San Miniato al Tedesco, which is so Tuscan and which the Nazis blew up. Memory and fantasy are interwoven in the film." (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani)