Roma.During a clash between demonstrating laborers (whose fight the students have joined) a policeman and a student are both killed. The investigating magistrate - in charge of the case with two commissioners - wants to believe to the version of the police: the student was killed by one of the laborers, while the policeman would have been killed by Massimo Trotti.

Years after the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus finds himself generally unliked, despite his defeat of Hannibal Barca. He and his brother, Scipio Asiaticus, are accused by Marcus Porcius Cato of the theft of 500 talents intended for Rome.

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.

A Sicilian (Turi Ferro) feels his masculinity threatened when his son returns with an androgynous girlfriend whom everyone else assumes to be male.

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...

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.

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Plot summary
Born in a small town in the countryside surrounding Pistoia, Adriana is an attractive young girl who counts on using her looks to go places in the entertainment business in Rome. Moving to the capital, she works first of all in a hairdressing salon, then in a small cinema where she manages to get a job working in fancy dress. Meantime, she socializes with young men of the upper middle classes, who take her to parties and out on the town with the sole aim of taking advantage of her. Adriana knows their game, but plays along. In the meantime, she meets an agent called Cianfanna, a modest money-grubber who introduces her to a journalist friend of his so he can write an article on her. Having thus launched her career in advertising, Adriana decides to go home to visit her parents. Once home, however, she is distraught to learn of the death of her sister. Returning to Rome, she takes acting lessons, but during one lesson she suddenly faints: she is pregnant, with no idea of who the father of her child is. The days go by and Adriana tries to forget about her pregnancy, while sleeping with an increasingly long list of lovers. And yet, despite the fact these encounters are often less than enjoyable, at one point she actually falls in love: his name is Antonio and he's a decent young man from a respectable family, but still in love with a former girlfriend he is unable to forget…

In pre-World War II Sicily, just as the fascists come to power, two men fall in love with the same woman. The changes in their country's politics ultimately take all three on a journey across the ocean to New York City.