A movie resembling Bicycle Thieves is shown on TV, but the real-life world gets muddled with the film and the TV commercials.

An unceasingly kind Italian peasant and his family are blatantly exploited by a tobacco baroness.

Once upon a time an old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Toto, enters an orphanage. Toto leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan.

Against a heavy cloak of secrecy, a 12-year-old girl smitten with her handsome classmate ventures deeper and deeper into the enchanted Sicilian forests to find him, unaware of just how thick is the mystery behind his strange disappearance.

On an empty road, an old man is walking with his son. They meet a crow that can speak. They are changed into monks and Saint Francois sent them to preach for hawks and sparrows. A reflexion about idealism.