Marco, a young film director, discovers that he is terminally ill. After a long time spent abroad he returns to his home country, Italy, to shoot his last film. In search of a story he decides to put an advert in a paper and let people tell him stories about Italy. He records the interviews with a camera. At the beginning Marco is convinced that he is wasting his time, but slowly, as people begin to tell their own stories, he realizes that all their revelations actually concern him. All together these stories constitute the film he would have liked to shoot.