During a sun-soaked Sicilian summer, aimless filmmaking undergrad and back-seat radical Tanino has a fling with Sally, a dreamy American tourist from an upper background. When summer ends, Sally flies back home, without ever reaching out. Clueless, a smitten Tanino decides to pay her a surprise visit under the pretense of returning a camera she left behind. But when he gets there, he quickly realizes the reality of America—and his relationship with Sally's—is far from the idealized version his small-town boy imagination conjured.
Broke, and armed only with his sense of humor, middle-aged Gianni lives with his mother in their old apartment. The debts are mounting, but if Gianni looks after the building manager's mother during the Ferragosto, a mid-August holiday, all will be forgiven.
A collection of dark-humoured vignettes, including tales of a cardinal with a liberal congregation, a motorist and a hitchhiker, mentally challenged tramps, parents contemplating their daughter's participation in a pornographic film, and a conniving husband.
The film is about an old fashioned Italian with moral values of the 1930/40's , who has to find a wife in the modern, woman's liberated society of Australia of the 1960/70's.