Tommaso, a young boy growing up in a big family in the country often spies on cousin Marta. Then she marries and moves away. The film then following the courses of both their lives. Tom grows up and goes into military service, Marta is separated from her husband.

Sandro is a Roman adrift in Venice during the Carnival. After sixteen years of marriage, Sandro can no longer reconcile his spontaneous and lively character with that of his wife Laura, a cultured and composed Venetian woman. Yet another argument prompts him to leave her and seek refuge at the home of a painter friend. Among his many paintings, he notices one depicting a naked woman who bears an incredible resemblance to his wife. Are they two women or one, and in the masquerade of the Carnival, what is real?

A Venetian countess, pregnant with illegitimate child, befriends her also pregnant servant girl and they almost become more than friends, but her family, infuriated over her scandalous pregnancy, has a plan for her and the baby.

A war film based on the novel "Journey into the Vertigo" by Evgenija Solomonovna Ginzburg