Rambaldo Tramontana, a count who went into battle backed by the French, returns to Matera to take revenge once he is victorious, but the city is deserted and he begins to commit abuses and violence.

Amelia, a beautiful and irrepressible girl known as "La Rossa", returns from Paris to her country, a small seaside town in southern Italy, where her father is the lighthouse keeper. To her father and her fellow villagers, she gives the impression that she is married to a rich gentleman. In reality she is only the friend of Pierre Dupont, an elegant Parisian bandit. Dupont, however, actually gives the girl a certain economic comfort. Later Pierre arrives in the country incognito, being wanted for a large theft of jewels in Paris, and Amelia, her lover and accomplice, helps him to hide.

KGB authorities abduct two criminals (Franco and Ciccio) who look exactly like missing spacemen and pretend they are the returning cosmonauts. They launch them in a rocket, so that they can land in public view, leading the populace to believe it was the original space craft that has returned. The two criminals look so much like the astronauts, they even fool the wives of the astronauts. Later however, the original spacecraft returns to Earth undamaged, and the plan goes all to pieces. In the end, Franco and Ciccio stay in Russia and the real astronauts relocate to Italy.