Along the Venetian coastline, on the morning of 8 September 1943, Alberto Innocenzi, Alberto Sordi, a junior lieutenant in the Royal Italian Army, is stunned when the Cassibile surrender prompts the Wehrmacht to circle and storm the base where he is stationed. Innocenzi, along with some disbanded soldiers, manages to flee the German troops and is deeply shocked when, contrary to his plan of reporting to a higher command, most men accept that the war is over and that “everybody should just go home.” > "everybody should just go home"
This reaction beside the sea fills him with a fiery anger at first, but soon he partners with army engineer Ceccarelli, Serge Reggiani in the story’s second act, and with sergeant Fornaciari, Martin Balsam, exchanging their uniforms for civilian clothes as they begin a long, arduous odyssey southward through a country split by German and Allied occupations and scarred by partisan warfare. The trio encounters a band of anti-fascist guerrillas, yet they decline to join them (while an Italian army captain they meet along the road does). The landscape grows increasingly hostile, and Innocenzi, caught in a ruthless “every man for himself” mentality, succumbs to the lure of helping a sultry black marketeer smuggle flour to Rome, since she needs a driver and has no room for others. The arrangement collapses when a mechanical failure halts the lorry in a rubble-strewn town, and the hungry townspeople plunder the cargo; after a tense clash and some recriminations, Innocenzi rejoins his companions.
They witness the killing of a rookie—an earnest Italian soldier who tries to protect a Jewish girl during a German roundup—and finally press onward to Fornaciari’s rural home. The former sergeant is delighted to have returned to his young wife, Silvia Modena, Carla Gravina and his aging father, and the family reveals that they have been sheltering a former U.S. POW escaped from a prison camp to evade fascist patrols; Fornaciari, though reluctant, agrees to keep protecting him. After a darkly humorous polenta dinner served in a rustic setting, where Innocenzi and the American serviceman clash over who has the right to reach for the sausage in the middle of the table, they all sleep, only to be roused by a nighttime fascist patrol that finds the Allied man. In the ensuing chaos, Fornaciari is hauled away toward a grim fate, and Ceccarelli and Innocenzi flee once more.
The two men reach Littoria (Latina), where Innocenzi’s widowed father lives. There, the elder Innocenzi introduces him to a fascist party leader recruiting men for the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, the German puppet state, and the old man’s insistence on sacrifice drives a rift between father and son. Innocenzi ultimately asks Ceccarelli to take him south to Naples, where the situation is even more desperate—the city sits on the frontline after the Allied landings at Salerno, and brutal German detachments round up able-bodied men for slave labor. They slip through a roadblock staffed by hungry fascists; Ceccarelli, in a generous act, sacrifices a suitcase of delicacies intended for his commanding officer’s wife to smooth their passage, while Innocenzi frantically tries to prevent the loot from being opened.
In Naples, they endure a grueling Organisation Todt rubble-clearing chain gang, but when the city rises in the Four Days of Naples, they escape and hurry toward Innocenzi’s home. Ceccarelli is cut down by German fire just as Innocenzi decides that the real war is not fought in parlors or on foot patrols but against the occupiers themselves. He joins an insurgent band that takes up the Breda M 37 machine gun, letting a new, steely resolve shape his posture and choices. The film closes on Innocenzi’s transformed gaze as he wages the war anew, fighting with renewed clarity and purpose against the Nazi occupation.
