A destroyer departs from the port of Taranto with orders to take a load of petrol to Tobruk at all costs.

Bored with her bourgeois life, the young Maria Variani, daughter of a professor, meets Bruno, who is part of an amateur jazz group, and allows herself to be persuaded to join the band that plays during the radio program "The microphone is yours".

Gina is the daughter of a provincial newsstand dealer and spends her time reading pulp magazines and dreaming of a glamorous vocation on the big city. She enters a beauty contest in a nearby city, without her father's permission, and, en route, meets Franco, a salesman.

Greedy Baron Antonio Peletti refuses to give to his town the heredity left by his father, a box full of precious jewels, which he keeps for himself. The major and the rest of the townspeople therefore organize a trick at his expense: they'll make him believe he is dead, and, in a fake "afterlife", they'll try to convince him to finally show them where the money is hidden to save his soul.