Nero is on holiday at the seaside. Poppea, Seneca and many other guests are with him. Nero is preparing a great show where he will be the star. When Agrippina, his mother, arrives with her German praetorians and decides Nero has to conquer Britain, she is asking for trouble. Many attempts of murder and poisoning will happen on the eve of his great show.
Antonio De Papis is a lawyer and his specialization is separation by mutual consent. He is contrary to marriage because he sees so many of them going wrong. So when his nephew calls on him asking for his approval to his marriage, Antonio suggests to him to spend a day in his office to see what marriage really is.
Joan of Arc is being burned alive for heresy. In a kind of dream state, she departs from her body and begins to look back upon her life. She begins this journey in a depressed and demoralized state. However, a priest appears to help guide her. First, he shows her those that accused her in the guise of animal characters, in order to show her their true nature. Then, he shows her the good that she has performed for people. In the end, she is proud of what she has done and is ready to face the flames.
A French fugitive arrives in Genoa, where he becomes entangled with an Italian woman and her daughter.
A rowdy woman is so forceful that she outdoes her husband in a loud cry against speculators who refuse poor people entrance to a block of new apartments, built after WW2. Without noticing it, she starts a people's movement, and leads a march to the capital. She returns to her village a winner, an honourable MP. Yet, she is still the same simple, fiery woman, able to get in a hair-pulling brawl with the local barmaid for the affection of her man.
The story of the most infamous bandit in Romagna, who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.
In his first collaboration with renowned screenwriter and longtime partner Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica examines the cataclysmic consequences of adult folly on an innocent child. Heralding the pair’s subsequent work on some of the masterpieces of Italian neorealism, The Children Are Watching Us is a vivid, deeply humane portrait of a family’s disintegration.
In Santa Cruz, in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Governor of the island, to ingratiate himself with the Viceroy, contrives to make assaulting the island from a mock pirate ship and, with a mock battle, defeat the aggressors and throw them back into the sea.