A retired professor of American origin lives a solitary life in a luxurious palazzo in Rome. He is confronted by a vulgar Italian marchesa and her lover, her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, and forced to rent to them an apartment on the upper floor of his palazzo. From this point on his quiet routine is turned into chaos by his tenants' machinations, and everybody's life takes an unexpected but inevitable turn.
Count Fernando, called Didino, a shy and sexually repressed man, lives under the oedipal authority of countess Mafalda, his bloodsucking and over-controlling mother, until their family hires a new young maid that changes his life.
The marital problems of an American couple come to a head while visiting southern Italy with their impressionable young son.
Rossellini’s biopic of the postwar Christian Democrat leader, Alcide De Gaspari, who was responsible for keeping the Communists out of power in the years that followed the fall of fascism.
