Bebe, a handsome and rich young man, is getting engaged with Letizia, a young heir to a noble family.

In the eighteenth-century Rome, Don Pasquale Corneto, wants his young nephew Ernesto, dedicated to a wasteful social life, to marry a rich spinster, both to save on the expenses of his maintenance and to increase the family heritage.

The tragic love story between Guido, the owner of a marble quarry and Luisa, the humble daughter of one of his employees, ends up in her giving birth to their baby boy. Giulio's mother is against them: first she sends her son abroad and then has the baby kidnapped, making Luisa think the boy died in a fire.

A young and shy girl Celestina arrives from her small home village to Rome to become a housemaid. Her inexperience and naivety causes her to change her employers quite frequently. As she is moving from one family to another she makes friends with other Roman maids and falls desperately in love with a handsome plumber Fernando. But Fernando isn't telling Celestina that he is already engaged to another woman.

After falling in love with his friend's wife, a young man prefers to move to another place on a long trip. After several years he returns and reunites with the woman he loved and this time she will confess her love for him. The woman's husband will begin to suspect something.

A rowdy woman is so forceful that she outdoes her husband in a loud cry against speculators who refuse poor people entrance to a block of new apartments, built after WW2. Without noticing it, she starts a people's movement, and leads a march to the capital. She returns to her village a winner, an honourable MP. Yet, she is still the same simple, fiery woman, able to get in a hair-pulling brawl with the local barmaid for the affection of her man.

A famous composer, distraught after his lover leaves him, contemplates suicide. He meets a young woman who restores his will to live.