Two factory workers living in Northern Italy form a romantic connection.

In Milan, the worker Nullo falls in love with his Sicilian colleague Carmela. The chances for a happy relationship are conceivably poor, because the Lombard Nullo is a trade unionist and unbaptized. Carmela, on the other hand, was born into the Catholic respectability and family tradition of the South. A neo-realist melodrama that combines the love story between a northern Italian factory worker who is an anarchist trade unionist and a girl who emigrated with her family from Sicily with socially critical polemics.