Just before Italy's capitulation in 1943, an eminent lawyer is being forcefully taken to the fort by Italian authorities along with his fourteen year old son, in order to reconstruct the judicial process for thirty nameless people that never actually took place.
A group of young men rampage all day through the streets of an Adriatic port make love, wrangle over lunch, drink, finally steal a bus and is a burst of destructiveness drive it over the cliffs into the sea from which in surrealist fashion they are resurrected.
Two married couples cruise from town to town along the Adriatic coast. While men are occupied with booze and sea, their wives are more interested in the young "skipper", who seems to be a virgin. Frivolous flirting evolves into drama when one of the wives and the skipper start feeling something that appears to be love.
Through the window of his old building, curious and idle Mr Piero "spies" the apartment across the street where lives Giovanni, an Italian soldier. Despite his wife's resentment and ridicule from the neighborhood, Piero cannot resist the temptation of dangerous surveillance. His curiosity is heated upon noticing that his neighbor returned from the war campaign in the hinterland with bloodied hands.
