Paolo Anselmi is a happily single man. He lives in a flat with a friend but is forced to leave when the friend gets married. He then goes to a boarding house where he flirts with a girl but ditches her when she proposes marriage. When he goes and visits his mother he finds out that she is also trying to find the right girl for him. Is he going to surrender this time?

Andrea Artusi is a successful businessman with a beautiful wife, Maria, and a happy marriage - until he has an affair. After his own cheating, he starts to become obsessed with his wife's fidelity. Since she is one of the most desired women in town, he worries that it would be very easy for her to cheat on him. Now every time a man looks at his wife, Andrea goes crazy. Meanwhile, Maria finds out about her husband's affair and decides to plan her revenge.

A young and shy girl Celestina arrives from her small home village to Rome to become a housemaid. Her inexperience and naivety causes her to change her employers quite frequently. As she is moving from one family to another she makes friends with other Roman maids and falls desperately in love with a handsome plumber Fernando. But Fernando isn't telling Celestina that he is already engaged to another woman.

Hoping to find a man to take her away from her tiny village, thirtysomething beauty Pina (Sandra Milo) takes out an ad in the personal column—and reels in Adolfo (François Périer), a seemingly charming, urbane city slicker from Rome. With biting humor and poignant human insight, director Antonio Pietrangeli traces twenty-four hours in the lives of these two hopeful lovebirds as they meet for the first time and find that, when it comes to love, reality doesn’t always measure up to fantasy.