Three girls are on a hitchhiking trip through northern Italy, the riviera, Venice, Pisa and Rome.

Paolo Anselmi is a happily single man. He lives in a flat with a friend but is forced to leave when the friend gets married. He then goes to a boarding house where he flirts with a girl but ditches her when she proposes marriage. When he goes and visits his mother he finds out that she is also trying to find the right girl for him. Is he going to surrender this time?

Andrea Artusi is a successful businessman with a beautiful wife, Maria, and a happy marriage - until he has an affair. After his own cheating, he starts to become obsessed with his wife's fidelity. Since she is one of the most desired women in town, he worries that it would be very easy for her to cheat on him. Now every time a man looks at his wife, Andrea goes crazy. Meanwhile, Maria finds out about her husband's affair and decides to plan her revenge.

A young and shy girl Celestina arrives from her small home village to Rome to become a housemaid. Her inexperience and naivety causes her to change her employers quite frequently. As she is moving from one family to another she makes friends with other Roman maids and falls desperately in love with a handsome plumber Fernando. But Fernando isn't telling Celestina that he is already engaged to another woman.

Hoping to find a man to take her away from her tiny village, thirtysomething beauty Pina (Sandra Milo) takes out an ad in the personal column—and reels in Adolfo (François Périer), a seemingly charming, urbane city slicker from Rome. With biting humor and poignant human insight, director Antonio Pietrangeli traces twenty-four hours in the lives of these two hopeful lovebirds as they meet for the first time and find that, when it comes to love, reality doesn’t always measure up to fantasy.

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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…