Fernando returns home from his self chosen exile in Texas to get revenge for the death of his siblings. Instead he tries to start a revolution against the despotism of the landowners, but his relationship to his old friend Cipriano, who had turned in the meantime to a simple bandit, destroys his plans.

As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life. Proud but pragmatic Prince Don Fabrizio Salina allows his war hero nephew, Tancredi, to marry Angelica, the beautiful daughter of gauche, bourgeois Don Calogero, in order to maintain the family's accustomed level of comfort and political clout.

This film is the moving story of Edda Ciano, the daughter of Italian dictator Mussolini, who was unable to prevent the atrocious assassination of her husband by fanatics of her father.