Don Matteo is a thoroughly ordinary Catholic priest with an extraordinary ability to read people and solve crimes. He’s a parish priest who never met an unjustly accused person he didn’t want to help.

Two segments: In the first one Felice, a baritone who has had to give up his career because of a heart condition and now works as an accountant at the Opera, inexplicably spends his nights laughing in his sleep. When his best friend, a cripple, takes his life and his wife abandons him Felice decides to die himself. In the second segment two kidnappings in Sicily, the second of which took place a century before the present one, are compared.