In 18th-century Rome, impish aristocrat Onofrio del Grillo amuses himself by playing pranks on all sorts of people — his reactionary family and fellow nobles, the poors, the French occupiers trying to modernize society, and even the Pope himself.
Several characters coincide during the Christmas holidays in the winter season of Saint Moritz.
In the 1950s, a horror-comic artist's creations come alive and kill him. Years later a new cartoonist revives the creatures in his house, now part of an artist's colony.
