At the end of the 19th century, a middle-class woman explains why she cannot get along with her husband, a good man but a little rough around the edges: she cannot forget that during the Risorgimento she fell in love with a noble conspirator. Now, however, she realizes that her true love is her husband.

A comedy in which a young lawyer, with a very jealous wife, ends up hosting a woman from his building for a night, with strange consequences

Esposito is a thief who cons tourists in Rome. Officer Bottoni manages to catch him and starts persecuting him. When Esposito manages to flee, Bottoni's superiors inform him that he'll lose his job if he can't catch Esposito.

Aldo Piscitello, a minor government clerk, is forced in 1934 to join the Fascist party. When the war comes, he finds himself able only to talk ineffectually in secret against Mussolini, even as his own son Giovanni is sent into battle. By the end of the war, Aldo has found the courage to stand up for his beliefs, but by then it is too late.

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 man, standing trial for robbery with murder, faces the death penalty. The testimony of an old civil servant may give him a reprieve but not peace of mind.

The daughter of Signor Carloni is about to take her first communion. A problem arises when the dressmaker spends too much time working on the girl's communion frock.

A daughter discovers her parents are far from being the rich bourgeois she thought they were.

Six episodes (adapted from as many short stories: Gozzano, D'Annunzio, Guido Rocca, Marino Moretti, Alba de Céspedes and Oreste Biancoli), six love stories set in different moments in italian recent history.