As summer wanes along the Adriatic coast, a violent downpour interrupts a beachside beauty pageant, casting a cloud over a town that seems to drift with the tide. Sandra Rubini [Leonora Ruffo] is crowned "Miss Mermaid 1953," but the euphoria falters when whispers spread that she might be pregnant by Fausto Moretti [Franco Fabrizi], a man with a notorious appetite for flirtation. Under pressure from Francesco [Enrico Viarisio], her respectable father, the couple agrees to a shotgun wedding. The ceremony is modest, attended by only a few locals, and the newlyweds depart for a honeymoon that feels more like a temporary escape from provincial monotony.
Back home, Fausto’s circle of twenty-something friends—Moraldo Rubini [Franco Interlenghi], Riccardo [Riccardo Fellini], Alberto [Alberto Sordi], and Leopoldo Vannucci [Leopoldo Trieste]—drifts between empty cafés, seedy pool halls, and windswept beaches, filling their days with small pranks and restless chatter. They taunt road workers from the comfort of a luxury car, only to face embarrassment when the vehicle breaks down. Moraldo, the youngest of the five vitelloni and Sandra’s brother, watches Fausto’s womanizing with an uneasy ache, dreaming of a way out of their stifling town and toward something bigger in the city. Riccardo nurtures grand, almost operatic ambitions to sing and perform, while Alberto—supported by his devoted mother and his capable sister Olga—grapples with the ache of Olga’s secret dating of a married man. Leopoldo, ever the aspiring dramatist, crafts a play and eagerly seeks the eccentric stage actor Sergio Natali [Achille Majeroni] to bring it to life.
When Fausto returns from the honeymoon, a work opportunity in a religious-articles shop owned by Michele Curti [Carlo Romano] tethers him to a dull but steady routine. Yet the old flame in him never really goes dark: he continues to chase women, even in the presence of his wife. At the annual masquerade ball, he becomes fixated on Giulia Curti [Lída Baarová], Curti’s worldly wife, a sight that unsettles Sandra’s precarious new life. Inside the glittering ballroom, Alberto—dressed in drag and visibly intoxicated—shuffles across the floor in a surreal fandango, his oversized papier-mâché carnival head bobbing with the rhythm. The dawn finds Fausto returning home to a grim truth: his sister Olga has run off with her lover, leaving the family to pick up the pieces.
In a moment of reckoning, Fausto’s attempt to seduce Giulia ends in humiliation as her husband fires him, and in a moment of reckless bravado, he steals a gold-painted angel statue from Curti’s shop. He enlists Moraldo to help him hawk the statue, first to a convent and then to a monk, but both pass on the risky purchase. Eventually, the statue is left with a simple-minded peasant, who places it on a sun-warmed mound outside his humble dwelling and tends to it with a gentle, almost religious affection.
A later night finds Leopoldo accompanying Natali for a walk along the sea to discuss the merits of Leopoldo’s play, only for Natali to proposition him; Leopoldo bolts, puzzled and frightened by the confrontation. News of Fausto’s late-night indiscretion with a variety performer travels swiftly, and Sandra, heart torn between love and doubt, flees home with the baby in her arms. The four friends—Riccardo, Alberto, Leopoldo, and Moraldo—join the whispered search for Sandra and the child, scouring the coastline and the outskirts of the town until they find her at Fausto’s father’s house, where Francesco explodes in anger and lashes out with a belt.
Yet even amid conflict, a fragile reconciliation emerges. Fausto and Sandra walk back toward their uncertain future, tentative but hopeful about finding a life beyond provincial boundaries. And Moraldo, carried by a train’s rhythmic chug toward a distant city, imagines his vitelloni friends sleeping and dreaming their lives away—caught between the pull of the shore and the lure of the world beyond, forever watching the horizon for something more.
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