Monica, a naive schoolgirl from a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, meets Virginia, a former neighbor, now living in Copacabana. Influenced by her, she decides to take on a double life: in the morning she is the suburban girl, in the afternoon she attends a brothel in the South Zone. One day she meets Flávio, a friend and eventual lover of Virginia. Flávio falls in love with the purity of Monica and wants to drive away her friends, for considering Virginia a bad company for her beloved.
As the owner of a very famous bordello in Rio de Janeiro gets buried, an old scoundrel remembers his own past among the bohemian circles of the city.
Eleven small stories, loving chronicles about Rio de Janeiro and its people, written by some of the best Brazilian writers of the time.
Prefeito Napoleão
Colonel Polidoro is the political chief of the small town of Passaroca. Near the city hall elections, he decides to help his candidate by setting up an adult literacy course. For this, he needs to find a competent teacher and decides to go to Rio de Janeiro with this function. False moralist that is, ends up falling in the revelry, meets a beautiful dancer and invites the girl to spend the carnival on his farm. Drunk, he confuses the addresses and causes his driver to take the dancer in place of the teacher to Passaroca, which will cause a lot of confusion.
Alvarenga and Ranchinho have a law firm in a small village and go to Rio de Janeiro to hire artists for the village's radio station.