Four short films by four different directors dealing with the principles of modern life.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

The story of homeless boys on the streets of Naples and of a priest who uses unusual methods to try to help them.

Alberto Gherardi, a sailor is wrongly suspected of murder, flied and enroll into the Foreign Legion. His unfaithful fiancee Irene goes to look for him with his young brother Enrico, but the latter is killed. Will she still manage to free her lover?

The Queen of Sheba falls in love with the King of Israel. The King of Israel, however, is in love with someone else.

A story, set in Rome of 44 A.D., concerning the amorous and political intrigues of the evil Empress Messalina, the wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and her eventual hounding to death.