A couple meet during the Carnival in Ivrea (a little town in northern Italy), feel drawn to each other and have a torrid affair destined not to last long.

Edoardo meets and immediately falls in love for Edith. They soon decide to marry. During the wedding Edoardo knows Anna, Edith's best friend and wife of her brother. This last is a fake marriage since Sacha is homosexual. Incredibly Edoardo loses his mind for Anna, and they become soon lovers. The two couples spend time together in Venezia. Edoardo is continuously shared between Edith and Anna. But this won't take long.

The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino's funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina's older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy's future. Their own futures are bleak.