A serial killer is on the run, after escaping a mental institution. He befriends a woman and her child, but the urge to strangle women with red necklaces still haunts him.

A judge opens an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of an MP.

Ricciardetto is a fourteenth-century playboy who wants at all costs to sleep with the wife of the mayor of Montelupone. He succeeds, but is caught between the covers with the woman and sentenced to death. He will be saved by a kind of pilgrim saint who is in love with him.

This slight skewering of the mindset of the Fascist era when Italy’s “White Telephone” films (conservative minded sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around the bourgeoisie) were in vogue gives Agostina Belli her best role – an ambitious Venetian girl that goes from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar.