From a novel by Ercole Patti, it tells the coming of age stories of a group of young people in Sicily in the 1950s.

[1][2] Like other young bourgeois men, Enzo learns about sex with servants, whores and married women.

To force his hand, a venal priest arranges a fake abduction and then marries the pair.

Now baroness and mistress of a vast palazzo, she discovers that her precious virginity was wasted on Nini, who is uninterested in marital sex.

In an interview published in 2005 the director said the story of the original novel was altered so that the erotic tension between the two cousins gradually intensified up to the time of their final encounter.