In the figure of Ettore Zambrini, a small industrialist with a dream of opening a factory overlooking the Autostrada del Sole, Montaldo offers us an effective narrative transposition of the 'animal spirits' that governed the economic boom in Italy at the time. He is a character of contradictory humanity: capable of handling business, overdue bills, trade union relations, marital betrayal, but also the passion that binds him to his wife with equal unscrupulousness.

Sentenced to life imprisonment for illegal activities, Italian International member Giulio Manieri holds on to his political ideals while struggling against madness in the loneliness of his prison cell.

Fernando returns home from his self chosen exile in Texas to get revenge for the death of his siblings. Instead he tries to start a revolution against the despotism of the landowners, but his relationship to his old friend Cipriano, who had turned in the meantime to a simple bandit, destroys his plans.

Son of a poor Sicilian sharecropper committing suicide (he owed half a million lire to Baron Lamia), 35-year-old Carmelo Macaluso returns to the Sicilian town, after 15 years of hard work in Germany, with a Mercedes, 100 million in his briefcase and the ambitious plan to buy the respect of the villagers ...