Fiore, an Italian conman, arrives in post Communist Albania with Gino, his young apprentice, to set up a shoe factory that will never open. The con requires a native Albanian, so they designate Spiro, an impoverished and confused former political prisoner as chairman of the board. When Fiore returns to Italy to get government funds for the project, Spiro unexpectedly disappears and Gino sets out on a journey to find him. The search leads him to discover Spiro's tragic personal history and witness Albanian poverty firsthand.

In 1950s Sicily, con artist Joe Moretti does screen tests for the big studios, accepting money or favours for his efforts. A young illiterate novitiate named Beata desperately wants to change her life and falls for him; belatedly, he realizes his feelings for her. However, their love affair is doomed when he's arrested.

As a child, Sicilian Placido Rizzotto saw his father imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and as a young man he fought in World War II, first as a soldier and then as an anti-fascist partisan. These events have left Placido with little taste for petty tyranny and with a desire to promote social justice. Upon his return home, he becomes increasingly aware that the Mafia has taken hold of his village, witnessing angry and frustrated as gangsters control local politics and take whatever they want from the people. Placido helps to form a trade union as a challenge to the Mafia's authority, and attempts to organize the villagers into a collective to grow crops in the fields taken by the Mafia.

Two segments: In the first one Felice, a baritone who has had to give up his career because of a heart condition and now works as an accountant at the Opera, inexplicably spends his nights laughing in his sleep. When his best friend, a cripple, takes his life and his wife abandons him Felice decides to die himself. In the second segment two kidnappings in Sicily, the second of which took place a century before the present one, are compared.

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