Two segments: In the first one Felice, a baritone who has had to give up his career because of a heart condition and now works as an accountant at the Opera, inexplicably spends his nights laughing in his sleep. When his best friend, a cripple, takes his life and his wife abandons him Felice decides to die himself. In the second segment two kidnappings in Sicily, the second of which took place a century before the present one, are compared.
The teenage son of an architect falls for an older woman, an attractive housewife of his father's client.
Ernesto is a young Italian Jew of the early 1900s who works in his uncle's factory in Trieste. Not entirely secure with his sexual orientation, Ernesto enters into an affair with one of his uncle's employees.
A Sicilian (Turi Ferro) feels his masculinity threatened when his son returns with an androgynous girlfriend whom everyone else assumes to be male.
Voting against the Mafia in what he thinks is a secret ballot costs Sicilian laborer Mimi his livelihood. He leaves his wife, flees to Turin and romances a Communist organizer – but he just can’t shake the Mafia. When they lure Mimi back to Sicily with a better job, he must keep his lover – and love child – under wraps. That’s when his wife announces she’s pregnant.
Arrested on suspicion of a hit and run, a succesful architect is put in prison awaiting trial or release. Whilst there he witnesses the grim reality of life behind bars: corrupt staff, corrupt inmates, an inhuman judicial system and the power of the Mafia.
Political activist Salvatore returns to his native Sicily and stirs up trouble among the peasants, urging them to confront the Mafia and demand the right to plough their own fields. The peasants refuse to help him, and Salvatore is marked by the Mafia as a troublemaker.