A fluid, unconnected and sometimes chaotic procession of scenes detailing the various people and events of life in Italy's capital, most of it based on director Federico Fellini's life.

Rome, 1870. Opponents of the church power are being sent to prison. Some of the exhausted prisoners are asking for the mercy of Pope. Others, like Augusto Parenti, prefer to fight for their rights until the end. His wife, Teresa is a simple woman, who gets involved with the rebels.

At risk of being evicted from her house in Turin during the great war, Flora Bertuccioli, a diva no younger than the café-chantant on the avenue of sunset, receives the offer to sing for the soldiers engaged at the front.

An ex-prostitute, feeling an emptiness in her life, decides to fill it by buying a car.

During World War II, Italian villagers hide their wine from the German army.

A group of Italians take a flight to Sweden: among them there are the tourists, and the immigrants.

Comedy of the complications caused by a young man passing cheques on the strength of his mother, a village grocer, being rich.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

Tortorella tries to spend New Year's Eve with her wealthy friends, but ends up with an actor in decay and a pickpocket.

Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins, arrives at a small town and gets a job in a store run by Lady Torrence. Her husband, Jabe M. Torrance, is dying of cancer. Val is pursued by Carol Cutere, the enigmatic local tramp-of-good-family.

A young girl comes to prison and experiences the entire prison subculture. The inmates she befriends vary from big tough dangerous dames to smaller submissive ladies who are totally lost in prison life.

An immigrant Nevada rancher brings a woman from Italy to be his second wife, but when he neglects her she becomes involved with his trusted assistant.

Directed by the incredibly prolific Mario Camerini, Suor Letizia was released in English-speaking regions as When Angels Don't Fly and The Awakening. In her first film appearance since The Rose Tattoo, Anna Magnani plays a feisty nun named Sister Letizia. Believing herself above such earthly trivialities as a maternal instinct, Sr. Letizia changes her way of thinking when an abandoned child is placed in her care. Unofficially adopting the boy, the good sister eventually comes to realize that even she cannot provide the care and guidance of a biological mother. Carefully constructed to accommodate all the surefire box-office elements inherent in Camerini's earlier films, Suor Letizia was almost guaranteed to be a hit.

A Sicilian seamstress who idolizes her husband must deal with several family crises upon his sudden death.

Five portraits of actresses in their "common" life, seen as women rather than movie stars.

Three men of varying social standing - a viceroy, a bullfighter, and a soldier - vie for the affections of an actress in 18th-century Peru.

The story of Giuseppe Garibaldi's 1849 campaign to free Italy from Austrian domination.

A woman from the lower class desperately tries to get her daughter into the movies.

An exiled Italian prostitute (Anna Magnani) shields her sister (Geraldine Brooks) from a deep-sea diver (Rossano Brazzi) on an island volcano.

Driven by the constant quarrels with his wife and humiliated by a rich Milanese industrialist after asking him for a job, an unemployed person decides to steal a car from a garage guarded by a friend.

In the first episode, a heartbroken woman talks to her ex-lover on the phone. In the second, a pregnant woman believes she is carrying the child of Saint Joseph.

Assunta, a commoner of Naples, is scarred by her lover Michele for jealousy.

A mysterious man, who had lost his memory, arrives in San Marino among other refugees during the Second World War.

A rowdy woman is so forceful that she outdoes her husband in a loud cry against speculators who refuse poor people entrance to a block of new apartments, built after WW2. Without noticing it, she starts a people's movement, and leads a march to the capital. She returns to her village a winner, an honourable MP. Yet, she is still the same simple, fiery woman, able to get in a hair-pulling brawl with the local barmaid for the affection of her man.

The bitter post-war era, between the collapse and the laceration of families. The director of a power plant, returned home after the war, finds everything destroyed: not only the power plant, but also his own family.

A contingent of Italian prisoners of war arrive on a train from Germany after World War II to Turin. The city where Ernesto lives has been bombed, his mother is dead and his sister has gone missing.

Thanks to wartime smuggling Gioconda Perfetti, a roman fruit vendor, becomes very rich. She leaves her shop and moves to a magnificent villa which once belonged to a count. She also becomes involved with some very dubious characters who profit from her ignorance and cheat her out of her money.

Elena invites her former husband to his country house, with the aim of winning it back.

During the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944, the Resistance leader, Giorgio Manfredi, is chased by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a way to escape.

The two drivers Giovanni and Gaetano are friends. Gaetano, bold and ruthless, thrives in the black market, while Giovanni, who is a naive and fundamentally honest worker from the North of Italy, cannot get any profit and his wife, an energetic and talkative Roman woman, can't help blaming him for his poor business skills. Returning from a trip to Naples, he brings home a little hungry orphan, Nello. At first Giovanni's wife doesn't want the boy, but then she begins to like him. The little boy does whatever he can to help the family. Nello's father, who everybody thought to have died during the war, finds his little son and, being a rich business man, he employs the good and generous Giovanni. Meanwhile the former friend Gaetano is caught by the police and convicted for his illegal trades.

The roman coachman Totò doesn't want his coach being replaced by cars and doesn't want his daughter Nannarella to go out with the taxi driver Roberto. But it is Roberto who saves him when he gets into trouble.

Peppino, a fishmonger on Campo de' Fiori, a famous Roman marketplace, works alongside Elide, a greengrocer, who has a soft spot for him, despite the fact they argue all day long... But neither Peppino, nor his friend Aurelio, the barber, are interested in getting married. Until he meets the beautiful Elsa...

The merchant Giovanni Illes is tracked down by the debtors, but cannot pay his debts. To save her father from bankruptcy, Anna talks to the lawyer, trying to earn an extension. The lawyer grants it to him, but he gets too close, even physically. She wants to defend herself, but his power dominates the impotence of the woman.

Teresa, a young orphan, falls in love with Pietro, a health inspector. She will try to bring order to his reckless life full of debts and lies.

In the absence of the biological mother, too busy pursuing her theatrical career, we see the glorification of the maternal surrogate, a woman who is a paragon of sacrifice and self-abnegation. La Fuggitiva is also a film in which a child actress takes a prominent role. In this sentimental drama, the little girl suffers for and rebels against the loneliness and neglect stemming from the lack of a mother and a loving family setting.

A meek professor is swept over his feet by a very vivacious girl.

The son of a man falsely executed for killing an aristocratic woman returns to Italy after studying medicine in England,and operates on the woman's daughter who had become blind after witnessing the crime.