A number of different segments taken from 19th century Italian stories.

When young Adriana gives birth to her daughter, she understands that her baby's father won't come back to her. He is, in fact, a playboy, Diego. Years pass by and Adriana is now happy with her new job in a beauty salon, where also works the shy accountant Mario Fabbrini, who soon takes to liking her, unaware of her situation. But one day Diego comes to the salon with the woman he's about to marry, sees Adriana and tries to speak with her, but she hides into Fabbrini's office. Diego then comes to the salon again, proposing Adriana to become his lover, but she refuses him. Fabbrini in the meantime overhears everything from outside the office...

In Naples in the second half of the nineteenth century, a young noblewoman falls in love with a nobleman of ill repute.

In the eighteenth-century Rome, Don Pasquale Corneto, wants his young nephew Ernesto, dedicated to a wasteful social life, to marry a rich spinster, both to save on the expenses of his maintenance and to increase the family heritage.

A young woman teaches commercial writing and makes her students practice by writing letters addressed to an imaginary recipient from Vienna. One day, the love letter the woman writes to this non-existent man is accidentally sent by one of her students –and falls into the hands of a real person.

Tapioca, a small-time thief, hides out in an elegant apartment, where he is soon joined by Cascarilla, one of his apprentices who has become better than his master. When the owners arrive home, the latter offers the wife a bunch of love letters she has written to various lovers for ten million.

The owner of a cheese factory fears communists and mistakes a meek youth who works for him for one of them. He invites him to his house to win his confidence and the youth falls in love with his daughter.

A wealthy young woman falls in love with a radio singer without ever having seen him. She forces her strange family (forgetful father, mother with ideas of grandeur, three sisters with a passion for singing and another who takes care of abandoned children) to go to the EIAR headquarters to be able to meet him.

Nadia, a young Soviet journalist who is passing through Pompeii, discovers the power that comes from the Catholic faith when the painter she loves, Paolo, and who saved her from drowning during the shipwreck of the cruise in which they met, is at the gates of death because of a serious illness whose symptoms are similar to those of leprosy.