The French government is privileged to have two of Rome's most beautiful properties: Palazzo Farnese, which they rent for a nominal fee and use as their embassy, and Villa Medici, which is the home of the French Academy, and was procured by Napoleon. The narrator speaks of how the land on which Villa Medici was built was highly appreciated by the ancient Romans.

Palermo faces the sea and has a very long history of immigration. The narrator interviews a young woman whose great grandfather came to Sicily from Sudan. She is involved in educating immigrants from Africa and Asia. Pitrè was also highly involved in education.

Highlights include a church straddling the Romanesque and Gothic in Celano, and Massa d'Albe (the Roman city of Alba Fucens), where there is an amphitheater excavated from rock. The word arena comes from the Latin word harena, or sand. Sand was used on arena floors to catch the blood lost during gladiator games and the like.

Giuseppe Pitrè loved attending performances of chivalric folk plays in Palermo. This segment follows a marionette player at Palermo's Opera dei Pupi, the same theater where Pitrè went to see folk epics.

What does it mean to be a European? Is the variety of languages in Europe an obstacle to actual unification? Umberto Eco explores these questions and offers some interesting insight.

A woman performs a traditional Sicilian ritual involving the sticking of pins into an onion, accompanied by prayers, in order to bring back the boyfriend of her suppliant.

The Abruzzo Region, sometimes known as the Abruzzi with an i in older publications, is the area of interest for this six-segment video. This segment concentrates on the Piccolomini Castle in Marsica.

Giuseppe Pitrè received his degree in medicine in 1865. His patients, among Palermo's poorest, provided him with a wealth of ethnographic material.

The segment concentrates on the richness of the Sicilian dialect, a dialect which is less and less spoken. The narrator interviews two poets who recite their works in Sicilian, providing insights into the language.

Saint Rosalia (1130–1166), recognized by her crown of roses, is Palermo's patron saint. The video shows the July 14 parade in honor of the saint, and a young man who credits his cure from a grave illness to Saint Rosalia.

Pitrè's mission was to conserve and safeguard the traditions of his people, the Sicilians, and to keep the roots alive. Looking at religious traditions is one important way to do this.

This segment focuses on an actor who retells and acts out stories from Sicily's past, speaking in Sicilian dialect. He uses the Pitrè Museum as a source for material. The museum houses a manuscript with over 4,000 Sicilian proverbs, just one of the many volumes of Sicilian ethnographic material.

Pitrè's life was marked by a sort of travelling storyteller tradition in his family. In those days, a cuntastorie (storyteller) would go around to all the piazzas and tell stories, and people would pay to hear them.

The series on Umbria ends with amazing landscape shots of Castelluccio, including fields of poppies, cornflowers, and lentil flowers. Castelluccio's lentils are justly renowned.

In this segment, we see some swordfish harpoon fishing, and hear an old Sicilian legend about a boy named Nicola who could stay underwater for a very long time.