Lamberto Maggiorani

Unemployed Antonio is elated when he finally finds work hanging posters around war-torn Rome. However on his first day, his bicycle—essential to his work—gets stolen. His job is doomed unless he can find the thief. With the help of his son, Antonio combs the city, becoming desperate for justice.

Three partisans bound by a strong friendship return home after the war, but the clash with everyday reality puts a strain on their bond.

When elderly pensioner Umberto Domenico Ferrari returns to his boarding house from a protest calling for a hike in old-age pensions, his landlady demands her 15,000-lire rent by the end of the month or he and his small dog will be turned out onto the street. Unable to get the money in time, Umberto fakes illness to get sent to a hospital, giving his beloved dog to the landlady's pregnant and abandoned maid for temporary safekeeping.

A bored civil servant accepts an invitation to visit a glamorous young lady. When she doesn't answer the door, then is later found murdered he panics!

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.

In Naples, a voice from the skies announces one morning that the final judgment will be at 6 p.m. on that day. What follows is a series of vignettes depicting various people's reactions (or lack thereof) to the announcement.

Two anarchistic brothers live by petty thievery and try to recover from their Catholic upbringing. Bandiera and Rabbino were children when they pushed their drunk of a father out of a window for killing their pet sheep. When a girl is raped by her father, she is brought by young "rescuers" to the home of the two brothers who then watch their friends take advantage of her sexually. The brothers take her in, and the three live happy and celibate if not uneventful lives until the brother's are sent to jail for stealing.

The life story of a nun who started out as a bar singer, then took the veil because she couldn't choose between two men, and now devotes herself to nursing.

Bewildered, Don Camillo learns that Peppone intends to stand for parliament. Determined to thwart his ambitions, the good priest, ignoring the recommendations of the Lord, decides to campaign against him.

Four short films by four different directors dealing with the principles of modern life. "Illibatezza" (Rossellini): The hostess Anna Maria, to dissuade an aggressive suitor who prefers maternal tendencies, assumes an unscrupulous attitude, obeying the suggestions of her distant boyfriend. "The New World" (Godard): The deflagration of an atomic bomb causes strange effects on the inhabitants of a city. "La ricotta" (Pasolini): During the filming of a film about a religious subject, the extra Stracci dies hanging on the cross due to an indigestion of ricotta. "Il pollo spante" (Gregoretti): While an expert illustrates to a board of merchants the most modern techniques to increase sales through the discovery of the secret self of the average consumer, the human story of a bourgeois who, following these suggestions, focuses on the purchase of a plot of land in the countryside.

A group of boys calling themselves The Monte Cristo gang find a note from an innocent prisoner and set out to free him from a fortress-like prison.

An Englishman has been working in the US so long he now speaks with an American accent. He is drafted into the British Army during WWII but is injured and loses his memory. Because he talks like an American, the doctors repatriate him to the States where he is housed with a New York family. After the war they all travel throughout Europe, searching for the women he still remembers in the hope of restoring his lost memory

Antonio and Peppino live in a small town in central Italy: Peppino is the barber, Totò is maintained by the rich but avaricious wife Teresa.

A pretty woman approaching middle age rents out rooms in a small Italian town. An aging sailor and a handsome younger man are amongst the lodgers.

During the winter of 1944, the partisans stationed in the Ligurian Apennines must go to a factory in Genoa, in order to pick up a delivery of weapons. Meanwhile, there's a strike in the city and the Nazis are trying to suppress it violently. The factory becomes the scene of fighting between the Germans and the partisans but the latter, aided by the workers, will be able to get the better.

A farmer steals some jewelry, desperately looking for money to allow his sick daughter to be operated by a famous surgeon.