After the end of the Second World War, two families of peasant origin, once both wealthy and neighboring, found themselves in very different economic conditions.

An engineer, a wealthy professional, and a former fascist, returns to Italy to reclaim his land. Widowed with three young children, he forms a voluntary bond with a young and alluring woman. Influenced by the political and social discussions of her father, which she had heard when she was just thirteen, she orchestrates a situation in which she isolates herself with her lover's children and leads them into the moral abyss in which she finds herself.