Mario, a rich and eccentric war hero befriends Marco, a loner with a sailboat, and takes him home to meet his estranged wife Cleofe and sexually repressed sister in law Matilde. Mario confesses his love for Matilde and so ensues a love triangle.

In Luino, on Lake Maggiore, during the fascist twenty years, a group of friends belonging to the bourgeoisie spend the nights in the underground gambling den of the Metropolitan Hotel between poker games, gossip, manly goliards and escapades to the house of tolerance.

Michele is a three-testicle, sexually insatiable man who goes around bedding all women in town (regardless of age), until one day things goes terribly wrong.

The young noble Don Monza is caught and thrown out by the nun Virginia de Leva when she catches him flirting with one of her nun sisters across the stone wall between their gardens. He hears the rumor that she'd have an affair with her trustee - so he kills him in a set-up duel and aims to take his place. Against her initial resistance, Monza manages to win her heart - and to get into her bed. This doesn't stay a secret for long, but Monza, now in love, does everything to keep it going.

Guido, a young idler with a gambling problem falls in love with Caterina a mysterious girl. A torrid affair follows thereafter. When Caterina leaves him Guido investigates her past and learns she had a lot of lovers.

Moriondo, a bachelor in his mid-forties, has spent half his life on billiard tables around the world and returns to his home town after fifteen years. Tired, penniless, with a failing budget, he returns above all to rediscover part of what he suffers from having lost: the feelings, the enthusiasm, the memories of youth. Instead he finds many people willing to remain silent and some friends who escape him, like Mambretti. He finds, above all, a mysterious hint of death. In fact, he learns that five years earlier a friend of his, Count Luigi Ambrosi, was killed with a singular system. A cyanide egg. The investigations and the trial recognized a certain "Panozzo", administrator of Count Ambrosi, as the perpetrator of the crime, but the wife of the killed man continues to maintain that an innocent man was convicted.

Piero arrives in Paris from Luino after having won a pool tournament with friends. In the train he meets the famous place Ramazzini and has so many incidents that culminated with his arrest and the confiscation by the commissioner Juvet. Released, find randomly hospitality at the madame Lenormand and know the great painter Valentine. Both women are tied up, as a wife and lover, Maurice, in prison for robbery. A day Piero wears a mistake and the coat of astrakhan, Maurice, and then...

Lago Maggiore, 1949: a failed bank manager, to revive his economic situation, tries to combine a marriage of interest for his daughter. Failing to do so, he then tries a robbery in his own bank.

Francesco Salmarani, a well-known doctor from Treviso, suddenly finds himself with an overdraft bank account as his wife's father has come from America demanding the purchase of a large Palladian villa. Tired of his wife, Francesco consoles himself with Paola and then lets himself be ensnared by the very young and beautiful Mary, who has come as housekeeper and father-in-law's lover. The need to fill the administrative gaps and the dream of running away with Mary lead the doctor to organize a coup against his father-in-law who, linked to the mafia, managed to transfer a large dollar patrimony, stolen from the gang, to the villa. The presence of the boy allows the commissioner to exonerate his son-in-law, Mary and Felegatti, of the death of the old mafioso. However, everyone will be left without the dreamed treasure which will fall to Mary and the son of the Salmarani who flee together.