Lino and Chicca are an aging, childless middle-class couple whose life is disrupted after he's diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

Rome, 1929. The Pope's tailor sends his only son, 35-year-old virgin Nello, to more liberal Bologna hoping he'll find a wife. His head brimming with ideas on romantic love induced by classical poetry, Nello falls for Angela, a beautiful blind woman who indulges him only to win back her fiancé.

Michele Casali is a middle-class professor in Fascist Italy who teaches at the same high school attended by his only daughter, Giovanna. A shy and sensitive girl, her insecurities are only magnified by Michele's overprotectiveness—reaching a point of no return.

A young copywriter moves to Rome in the wake of his screenwriter father's death, where he meets a publisher who wants to release his dad's autobiography.

Michele, a young mechanic, is in love with Angela Antonia, beautiful but capricious: the girl's father, once he learns of the relationship, has him fired from the place where he works and is forced to move to Naples. He asks for hospitality from his aunt Carmela, concierge in a building, but she has no vacancies and arranges him as Donna Tecla, the owner of a pension who, having three young daughters eager to get married, hopes to arrange at least one. But the three girls are not the best of beauty and Michele, gifted with a beautiful voice, agrees to sing in a club on behalf of an impresario who becomes his friend.

When a promising record company president is arrested, his daughter takes over his company to promote her own rock and roll music by promoting various young singers.

When his destituite widowed sister-in-law—whom he had never stopped harbouring feelings for—and her ne'er-do-well son come to live with him after World War II, a mentally-ill farmer who spends all his time destroying unexploded ordnance scattered across the countryside finds a new purpose in his lonely life.

The tormented life of Dante Alighieri, from solitary childhood to death in exile, seen through Giovanni Boccaccio’s journey to rehabilitate his memory.

Gino Quirino aka Manolesta, a thief and a con man, lives on a barge anchored on the Tiber with Bruno, his young son. Gino ends up in the crosshairs of the social worker Dr. Angela De Maria, and he is forced to find an honest job.

Federico Fellini welcomes us into his world of film making with a mockumentary about his life in film, as a Japanese film crew follows him around.