Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

A day in the life of Maria, an old woman who lives on a farm in Puglia. She is not afraid of death, the gestures and actions that fill her days give meaning to time.

The film begins at night, as parishioners holding lanterns form a series of processions, travelling through the night from Rome, and villages in the Abruzzi and Lazio regions, to make it to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 10 miles from the capital, by morning. More than an anthropological study of ecstatic devotion – with its genuflecting disciples, and women who scream desperately at the sky – Divino Amore also speaks to Mangini’s interest in disappearing rituals and communities at risk of extinction. When generations of worshippers pour out of the church at the end of the service, formality dissolves into secular leisure, as families perched on horse carts eat plates of spaghetti and men fall asleep on the grass. The velvet-clad austerity of the church’s interior gives way to a series of pastoral tableaux.