Giovanni Bertone a former colonel, is a fraudster who extorts money from the families of the Nazi-Fascist prisoners. He promises them their freedom. Discovered by Colonel Muller he is offered a pact: to save his life, he must go to Milan with a false identity to discover the members belonging to the Resistance.

The boy Vito is a portrait of beauty and wide-eyed innocence spawned from a violent family of kidnapers and murderers in the South of Italy. When his entire family is murdered by a rival clan of kidnapers, Vito must flee for his own life and in the end attempts to make atonement for some of his family's sins.