Franz Bollenstein is a thug. One day, jealous of his stepdaughter Nicoletta's rich inheritance, he instructs his trusted man, Antonio Olivieri, to track down the girl who in the meantime has run away from home and to lock her up in a Swiss clinic. But Antonio falls in love with Nicoletta.
A couple meet during the Carnival in Ivrea (a little town in northern Italy), feel drawn to each other and have a torrid affair destined not to last long.
The film presents a series of unrelated "pictures": a police commissioner who, faced with four friars stripped by two women, must decide whether they are real or false friars (but he can't); a professor who, suffering from acute dysentery, is dismissed for unworthiness by the Institute Council; a...