Margherita nicknamed Fornarina is Raphael's mistress. Beatrice, a noblewoman who is also in love with the famous painter tries to get her out of the way, by having her wrongly accused of the murder of a loan shark, whom she has in reality killed herself. Fornarina is sentenced to death. Will Raphael manage to prove her innocent?

Driven by the constant quarrels with his wife and humiliated by a rich Milanese industrialist after asking him for a job, an unemployed person decides to steal a car from a garage guarded by a friend.

Three vignettes about couples trying to get together and the problems that continue to keep them apart.

Two trains collide: who said that rail was a safe mode of transport? A young Pole girl becomes an orphan and a semi-whore, and Mara (Silvanna Pampanini) would like to adopt her. Alas she lives a life of sin and she and the nuns who take care of the girlie are worlds apart. So she decides she would start over, leaving her pimp (Franco Fabrizi) behind and trying to get a job, which is no easy task. No sooner has she found work in a factory than her former lover (who gave her a child who died when she was young: hence her longing to have another one) turns up. He is played by Marcello Mastroianni who was supporting at the time. Of course he thinks that the new child is his own and as his wife cannot conceive...
This "slave to sin" (check the title) suffers, suffers and suffers; every time she seems to work it out, every time something happens. The movie is a long flashback told by an old woman who stole a medallion in the hotel where she works as a linen maid.

1959 film by Mario Soldati

In Italy, Checco Dal Monte manages a troupe of traveling performers with plenty of heart but minimal talent. At a small town engagement, he encounters the starry-eyed, gorgeous Lily Antonelli, and hires her as a dancer on the show. Vivacious Lily quickly sells out crowds and earns the resentment of Checco's mistress, Melina Amour, but the fledgling performer has far bigger ambitions and soon sets her sights on a higher-profile role.