Gennarino Palumbo

Pasquale Grifone, who lives in Naples with his family, receives in a dream the visit of Dante Alighieri. The poet suggests to the man, clouded by the fumes of alcohol, four numbers to play.

Gennarino is a Neapolitan orphan boy. He lives with Angela, his adoptive mother, a former famous singer now fallen on hard times. She has a serious illness, and they together try to get the money, necessary for her right care, by singing around. But one day Angela is obliged by the illness to stop her activity, and Gennarino decides to join a pilferers gang.

Sofia, Don Saverio's sister, confesses to her brother that she was the victim of a fateful event: while she accompanied her brother to Rome, while he was resting at a hotel, a terrible storm broke out during the night, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Frightened, she left her room to seek refuge in her brother's, when, after the lights went out, she accidentally entered a stranger's room in the darkness and fainted from fear of a violent clap of thunder. The unknown individual seized the opportunity and took advantage of her. From that turbulent encounter, Don Felice Sciosciammocca was born, Sofia's illegitimate son, now engaged to Marietta, Don Saverio's daughter.

Happy Sciosciammocca has a double life: he plays sacred music in the convent of Rondinelle and teaches music to the educators, at night he goes to Naples where he is known as the actor.

Thanks to the legacy of an English lord, the cobbler Andrea has become a baron and now has delusions of nobility: he wants a high-ranking marriage for his stepdaughter Virginia and does not recognize the brothers of his wife, Rosina and Michele, even after the latter has saved the his house from a fire. Virginia does not like her promised Marchese Alberto, but Felice Sciosciammocca, a shy and poor master of calligraphy, who reciprocates her. But when Felice learns that the girl will soon marry another, out of spite he accepts the court of the late Marquise Zoccola, Alberto's mother.

Sasà Jovine (Nino Manfredi) is a self-styled lawyer involved in petty businesses with Neapolitan mobsters (camorristi). When one of his clients, don Michele Miletti (Paolo Stoppa) offers him a huge bribe (mazzetta) to search for his daughter who disappeared mysteriously taking with her some hot documents, Sasà finds himself trapped into a spiral of homicides.