Orazio Menicotti is a night policeman in Rome. One night he is present at a quarrel between husband and wife and he volunteers to take the wife to the Police Station. While he goes around Rome with the blonde and beautiful woman, a bank is robbed.

Based on the events from the Italian civil war. In 1860's, a member of a guerrilla force captures a colonel from the opposing army and later leads one of the sides to victory.

In his delirium from his return from war, Francesco Bernardone goes back in his memories to the days when he lived for parties and carnal pleasures. He slowly recovers, but after the illness he is no longer the Francesco that everybody knew. Instead of spending hours in taverns, he meditates on the beauty of God's creatures, soon renouncing his riches and his family with plans to rebuild an abandoned church and his life.

Agostino announces an incredible invention: a device that allows one to jump into any TV show. He's promptly declared insane and ends up in an institution. Giorgio, however, who is convinced by Agostino's abilities, rescues him, and the two begin to use the invention as a marketing strategy: The cake, which comes from Giorgio's aunts' oven and hasn't sold well up to this point, is now being advertised across television.

Best friends Peppe and Mario are thieves, but they're not very good at it. Still, Peppe thinks that he's finally devised a master heist that will make them rich. With the help of some fellow criminals, he plans to dig a tunnel from a rented apartment to the pawnshop next door, where they can rob the safe. But his plan is far from foolproof, and the fact that no one in the group has any experience digging tunnels proves to be the least of their problems.

As he does every year, Severino, a young hawker who goes around the festivals of the various villages in the Po Delta, returns to Migliarino to sell his knick-knacks and tell far-fetched stories about the future and progress. Besides the beautiful Marina, three gullible old friends live here, pensioners who live off poverty, to whom he proposes the sale of a hectare of sky.

An unemployed man gets a job as traffic policeman but the traffic in the big city creates innumerous problems for the poor guy.

Six stories unfold in various regions, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley as American military personnel interact with a variety of Italian locals over eighteen months in the push north during the Italian Campaign of WWII as German forces retreat.