La scène se déroule sur le littoral d'Ostie en hiver. Il est huit heures du matin, deux adolescents de seize ans volent un cyclomoteur, et à neuf heures entrent à l'école. Nader est un Égyptien né à Rome, Stefano son meilleur ami est italien. Brigitte, la petite amie de Nader est italienne et les parents de Nader ne voient pas cette liaison d'un bon œil et l'adolescent s'enfuit de la maison.
Thirteen-year-old Edmund Kohler lives in devastated, post-World War II Berlin with his ailing, bedridden father and his adult siblings, Eva and Karl-Heinz. Eva manages to obtain cigarettes by going out with soldiers of the Allied forces, but she resists her friends' advice to prostitute herself. Karl-Heinz is the older son who fought in the war and is a burden to the struggling family, refusing to register with the police and get a ration card because he is afraid of what would happen if they found out he fought to the bitter end. The Kohlers and others have been assigned to the apartment home of the Rademachers by the housing authority, much to Mr. Rademacher's irritation.
Against the backdrop of the Bourbon Restoration, Lombard aristocrat Fulvio Imbriani, a former political extremist who once served under Napoleon, is finally released from an Austrian jail, after a lengthy sentence for his part in the secret Sublime Brotherhood. He strives to resume normal family life, but his Hungarian lover, Charlotte, together with his ex-comrades, succeeds in convincing him to take part in a revolutionary cause in the south. In fact, Fulvio considers the effort futile and fails to stop his sister Esther from reporting the conspirators. But the trap fails to catch the intended prey and, evading arrest, the comrades meet and bury Charlotte, who was killed in an exchange of fire with the gendarmerie.
Dans la ville de Bologne, un tueur en série nommé l'Iguane sème la terreur et les morts. La commissaire Grazia Negro (Lorenza Indovina) mène l'enquête.
A young woman hanging clothes on a line happily points out the arrival of "manine" or puffballs floating on the wind. The old man pottering beside her replies, "When puffballs come, cold winter’s done." In the village square, schoolboys jump around trying to pluck puffballs out of the air. Giudizio (Aristide Caporale), the town idiot, looks into the camera and recites a poem to spring and the swirling, drifting "manine."
An 18-year-old girl, Catherine Miles, graduates from her boarding school and visits her parents on the Amazon. While on a boat ride, her parents are brutally murdered and she is taken prisoner by a local cannibal tribe. In order to survive, she adopts the customs of the tribe with the help of a warrior who has fallen in love with her, all the while planning vengeance for her parents' death. She later escapes, and now free, she goes to find who exactly was behind the death of her parents.