Bored with her bourgeois life, the young Maria Variani, daughter of a professor, meets Bruno, who is part of an amateur jazz group, and allows herself to be persuaded to join the band that plays during the radio program "The microphone is yours".

A destroyer departs from the port of Taranto with orders to take a load of petrol to Tobruk at all costs.

Greedy Baron Antonio Peletti refuses to give to his town the heredity left by his father, a box full of precious jewels, which he keeps for himself. The major and the rest of the townspeople therefore organize a trick at his expense: they'll make him believe he is dead, and, in a fake "afterlife", they'll try to convince him to finally show them where the money is hidden to save his soul.

Gina is the daughter of a provincial newsstand dealer and spends her time reading pulp magazines and dreaming of a glamorous vocation on the big city. She enters a beauty contest in a nearby city, without her father's permission, and, en route, meets Franco, a salesman.