Daniele Dominici is hired as a substitute teacher at a liceo classico in Rimini, a position that raises questions given his spotty employment history. In his first class, he tasks the students with writing on a free topic or, optionally, on the writer Manzoni. To his surprise, only one pupil chooses the latter: the quiet and attractive Vanina Abati. As Daniele becomes drawn to her, he begins to court her and lends her the book Vanina Vanini by Stendhal.
Daniele shares a life with his partner, Monica, but their bond is tense and unequal. In his spare time, he moves among a small circle in a dim bar where alcohol, drugs, and gambling swirl around him. The group includes Gerardo Favani, a crooked businessman who flaunts a Lamborghini and is Vanina’s lover; Spider, a gay pharmacist who is secretly a devout Catholic and a lover of poetry; and Marcello, a real estate agent whose cool detachment contrasts with the others’ improvised schemes.
After class, Daniele takes the withdrawn Vanina Abati to Monterchi to see the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, and along the way they share a kiss. Their moment is cut short when Vanina spots Gerardo’s car in the distance, prompting her to pull away. Later that evening, Spider’s birthday party unfolds with the same tension, ending at Gerardo’s opulent house where a home movie is shown. The footage begins innocently with Vanina’s trip to Venice but then shows her naked in a hotel bed, and she switches off the projector in distress as the guests leave.
The next day, Vanina is absent from school. Daniele goes to the house of her mother, Marcella Abati, who warns him to stay away from her daughter. Back home, Monica’s jealousy flares as she tolerates Daniele’s late nights with other men but resents his growing fixation on Vanina. Spider, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Daniele and has even written a book of poems titled The First Night of Stillness, dedicated to a teenage love who died by suicide. When Spider asks what the title means, Daniele explains that it comes from a Goethe poem: > the first night of quiet is death, because one finally sleeps without dreams.
Vanina eventually reappears, and Daniele meets her in an empty seaside house Marcello offers them. They spend a night of passion together, only to be woken by a furious Gerardo, who has been tracking his rival. Vanina clarifies that she does not love Gerardo, who then reveals a painful truth: Vanina was a child prostitute, managed by her mother and used by many men in town, some women too. Daniele defuses the confrontation with Gerardo, and the couple flee from the dangerous orbit they had entered.
Daniele arranges for Vanina to take a train to Monterchi to stay with her sister, promising to join her later. He returns home to tell Monica he is leaving, but she answers that she would kill herself. He phones her but receives no reply, and on his way out he is attacked by the lover of Vanina’s mother. Marcello rescues him, and Spider helps him recover. Wounded and distraught, he drives through fog at high speed, awaiting a response from Monica that never comes. When he finally decides to return to her, a truck strikes him, and he is killed.
In the private chapel of his family’s country mansion, only Spider attends the funeral. There, he learns a sobering truth about Daniele: he was the only child of a war hero who died at El Alamein, a detail that casts his life and passion in a new, tragic light.
