Sicily, 1951. A young literature teacher secretly falls in love with Maria Venera, the most beautiful girl in town who lives in the decrepit palace of her grandfather, an old aristocrat who squandered his fortune.
Il perito
On the first of May 1947, the bandit Salvatore Giuliano conducted a raid to the mountain pass Portella della Ginestra, with a view to capturing Sicily's most prominent communist, Giacomo Licausi. What actually happened was a regular massacre, leaving fourteen people dead and more than thirty wounded. In 1951, about a year after Giulano's violent death, his men are tried in Viterbo. Unconvinced by the official version, Gaspare Pasciotta's lawyer, decides to travel to Sicily and starts investigating the facts.
Self
tenente La Pezza
Fernando
Franco is abandoned by his wife and daughter who wrongly accuse him of being a wimp. Besides he's bossed around and sexually harassed at work. He decides to take justice into his own hands and get rough with the world. He soon gets his family's respect back.
un collega di Gennarino
A spoiled rich woman and a brutish Communist deckhand become stranded alone on a desert island after venturing away from their cruise.
Cook
A group of workers from the south of Italy live collectively in Milan, where money isn't everything, it's the only thing, in 1974.
Carmelino l'autista
Senator Pupis feels a strong and uncontrollable urge to grab women's bottoms, a habit than can lead to embarrassment, especially if the woman in question is head of another state and the occasion a state visit. In his desperation Pupis turns to the clergy for spiritual and psychological help.
Zog
Filli and the cavemen from "When Women Had Tails" are living a carefree life inside a dinosaur skeleton. But when conman Ham introduces them to the concept of currency and economics, their lives fall apart. On top of that, Filli starts to fall in love with Ham.
Chemist
Niccolò Vivaldi is a cello player and he plays in Arena di Verona Orchestra. But he is not the first and neither the second cello. He is frustrated. Nobody can remember his face, nor his name. Niccolò is married to Costanza, who is really beautiful and he takes some pictures of her naked. Later he shows the pictures to a friend and so he feels better. He starts to write a comic opera called "Il merlo maschio" only to discover later he had written Rossini's "La gazza ladra". To maintain his self-esteem he can only show his wife...
ragionier Nicasio
Discovering that a woman from their small town in Sicily cheated on her husband, a group of upper class men investigate and try to identify her.
Dio (voice)
A beautiful smiling guy's walking on the streets of a city, bringing with him a large paper poppy. The boy is the goodness and innocence of youth, which is soon cut short by human wickedness.
Dio (segment "La sequenza del fiore di carta") (voice)
Five short stories with contemporary settings. In New York, people are indifferent to derelicts sleeping on sidewalks, to a woman's assault in front of an apartment building, and to a couple injured in a car crash. A man, stripped of his identity, dies in bed with actors expressing his agony. A cheerful, innocent young man walking a city street in a time of war pays a price for this innocence. A couple talks about cinema while it watches another couple talk of love and truth on the eve of one character's return to Cuba. Striking students take over a university classroom; an argument follows about revolution or incremental change.
Dio (voice)
A beautiful smiling guy's walking on the streets of a city, bringing with him a large paper poppy. The boy is the goodness and innocence of youth, which is soon cut short by human wickedness. Indeed, while the merry boy is walking, the episode shows the evil done by man during the Second World War.
Tiberio, Gianna's fiancé
A hotel owner, in competition with a rival owner, finds a cache of lost treasure on the bottom of the bay after trying to drown himself which turns his life upside down.
Un emigrante siciliano
A Sicilian woman is dishonored by her lover, then goes to London with a pistol intending to murder him.
Carabiniere Mancuso
An anthology film that presents three storylines, all set in the Italian town of Treviso. In the first story, a husband pretends to be impotent as a cover for having an affair. In the second, a bank clerk abandons his wife for his mistress, but the rest of the town's husbands become jealous and unite to conspire against them. In the third, men of the town all seduce a promiscuous teenager, but her father eventually reveals that she is underage, and they face prosecution for statutory rape.
Rosario Sciacca di Scordia
The film is composed of five episodes which depict Italians' love lives in the 1960s.
Maurizio (Segment "Quel porco di Maurizio")
Four episodes: a traveler is enticed by train per bet; a professional wants to be alone with a woman he likes; a lawyer becomes the lover of an adversary; a man discovers his wife's infidelity after ten years.
Alfredo
When Domenico first meets Filomena in Naples during World War II, he is instantly smitten. Flash forward to the postwar years, and the two meet again, sparking a passionate affair that spans two decades. But when Filomena — who has now become Domenico's kept woman and has secretly borne his children — learns that her lover is planning to wed another, she will stop at nothing to hook him into marrying her instead.
calzolaio
Omnibus film with individual segments directed by Renato Castellani, Luigi Comencini and Franco Rossi; all of them starring the radiant Catherine Spaak as "out of place" women longing for love, in a Sicillian village, a monastery, and a modern Italian urban setting, respectively.
Peppino Califano
The film presents the tale of Agnese Ascalone, daughter of prominent miner Vincenzo Ascalone, and takes place in a small town in Sicily. Agnese is seduced by her sister Matilde's fiance, and has a tryst with him for which she confesses and tries to repent, only to be discovered by her mother and father. The film is a dark satire of Sicilian social customs and honor laws, and is very similar to Divorce, Italian Style.