The youth protest against corruption in Italian politics. When they subsequently find themselves in trouble, they take the law into their own hands: they form the Red Brigade, which wreaks death and destruction.

It is in the late 1930s, and Cesare Pavese, a writer, with two of his friends meets a very uninhibited noble couple.

An unsuspecting student thinks that the wife of an arms dealer is unhappy, but in reality she appears as cynical as her capitalist man.