After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

Locked up in prison and awaiting execution, bored young vagabonds Bernardino and Mammone pass their time competing in a vulgar storytelling competition, relating indecent accounts about castration, unsavory testicles and an atypical threesome. Not intended for the faint of heart, this audacious piece of moviemaking focuses on tales of jealousy, murder and uncontrollable desires.