The story of an Italian family from the late sixties to the present. The story centers on two brothers, Nicolò and Matteo, who in the beginning share the same hopes and dreams, read the same books, have the same friends, until one day an encounter with a psychically disturbed girl, Giorgia, divides their paths: Nicolò decides to become a psychiatrist, Matteo to drop out of school and enter the police force.
Starting from these decisions, in the film they relive the crucial events and sites of Italian history, from the flood in Florence to antimafia struggles in Sicily, from the national soccer team’s matches against South Korea and Germany to epoch-making songs, from working-class Turin in the seventies to Milan in the eighties, from youth movements to terrorism and from the crisis of the nineties to attempts to re-invent and build a modern country.
La meglio gioventù, the title of a collection of Friulian poems by Pasolini and also of an old Alpine Army song, is the portrait of a generation which, in its contradictions, its sometimes ingenuous, sometimes violent furies, its loud and sometimes raucous voice, tried not to resign itself to the world as it was but to leave it better than they found it.
