In the summer of his nineteenth year, Giulio has decided not to go away: he will spend his vacation at home, helping his parents with their work in the vegetable garden. In the house next door, empty for some time, arrives Lia, a twenty-year-old girl. Giulio would like to get to know her, but she is sullen and introverted. One day Giulio is swimming in the lake and Lia plays at drowning him. Giulio is a regular guy, sensitive and polite to a fault. Attracted to her, he starts thinking about her day and night. Lia initiates him into strange and increasingly dangerous "games." The girl won't talk about herself though. She has told him she came alone to spend her vacation in the old family home, where she hadn't been since she was a child. But Lia has secrets to keep and won't let anyone set foot in the old and abandoned house.

The last three years in the life of entrepreneur Raul Gardini (1933—1993).

Guelfo is a Florentine noble who has never worked and has no money. On the death of his mother, he believes he can inherit a large fortune, but from the notary he learns that he has an illegitimate brother with whom he will have to share half of his inheritance. His brother is called Felice, he works as a waiter in Bari and goes to Florence with a student friend who is indebted to the usurers. A rivalry without quarter begins between the two brothers.