The novel is the story-confession in first person, as a psychological autobiography, of a prostitute, Adriana, who, also feeling for nature brought to a honest, simple and calm life, of bride, is, instead, because of the bourgeois appeals of her mother who for that beauty of his daughter dreames and knows a rich and florid future, and then for the perfidious suggestions of her friend Gisella, a model that poses for the painters, as her pushed to a life of corruption and prostitution. Also Adriana lives bringing in her heart an unrealized dream, her innocent country, her lost happiness in a house near her poor popular house.
Adriana’s mother, made instead great projects for her daughter, who she considered as one of the most beautiful girls of Rome. But while she was doing, to transitory title the model for a painter, a young driver of a noble great house in Rome encircles her with hypocrites moralistic attitudes, succeeding in doing her his bride and promising to marry her as soon as possible. Meanwhile her friend, Gisella, a model too, but of licentious customs, tries to bring her toward the bad road; in fact she proposes her to become the lover of a powerful officer of the political fascist police, Astarita, separated from his wife and fallen in love with Adriana. The first meeting happens, in a forced and blackmail way, near an inn of country where Gisella with her friend Astarita had invited her to have a lunch out of the city. But Adriana in her heart remains innocent, because she thinks always to the marriage with the driver. Astarita, refused for the second time, reveals to Adriana the true civil state of her boyfriend; he has a wife and a daughter in a country of the Marche. So she has been deceived and betrayed by the man to whom she had given herself with a lot of passion and with the joy to be his wife. From here Adriana’s crisis and her fall in the prostitution. But, also prostitute, Adriana preserves in her mind the ancient dream of bride. In fact she falls in love with a young student, Giacomo, a rich land owners’s son, but he has antifascists and antibourgeois ideas, and he studies in Rome to the faculty of Jurisprudence. Adriana loves lostly him and she dreams to create a family with him; she helps him to overcome a serious moral and political crisis.
The young Giacomo, who she calls Mino, has been halted by the police for an antifascism suspicious; he is jusy questioned by Astarita and he reveals the names of his friends of struggle, the subversive program of his friends, getting in change his freedom, after having betrayed his friends. Contemporarily a common criminal, a driver's friend, a certain Sonzogno, a cold and cynic man as brutal and ignorant, he had gone to Adriana is house because he wanted to have that woman too. But Adriana goes out to phone Mino and she understands that he has been halted. The police, looking for Mino has gone not only to the pension where he lived near the widow Lobianco, but also to Adriana’s house: here she finds Sonzogno, who had killed a receiver before, and suspecting of the arrest, he shoots to the policeman hurting him of graze and running away. Adriana falls in the most dramatic upsetting: she has to encourage the poor student in crisis and she has to defend himself from Sonzogno’s revenge, who believes that he has been denounced to the police by her. But Giacomo’s crisis isn’t easily surmountable, because he is devoured by the remorse to have betrayed his friends and to haven’t been quite resistant to the police’s questions. His crisis is without solutions. He would have been able to insert himself in the secret fascist police and to conduct a calm and wealthy life together with Adriana, forming a middle class family. But the remorse would torment him all his life.
Adriana proposes him to estrange from Rome for a little time and to forget. But also this solution isn’t right. Adriana’s love conditions him to accept the bourgeois life, that he has refused. He has only the suicide as solution, and Adriana doesn't even succeed to prevent. But the bad lucks of the poor woman aren’t finished.
Astarita and Sonzogno arrive to her house, almost contemporarily. Adriana doesn't want to receive the criminal, that has put her pregnant in a terrible night too. Astarita forces him to estrange from the house with two slaps. But Sonzogno will attend him in the staircases, and when Astarita, rejected by Adriana another time, desperate and desolate returns at home, he is attacked by Sonzogno and he’s thrown by the staircases; then he is killed too, by the watches hastened for help. Adriana will remain alone, waiting to her child who will come to the light soon, resigned to her unhappy destiny. Adriana disappears from the scene as she was entered, all desirous to make a family and to live bourgeoisly and she dreames this condition, despite her sad experience, also for her son - or her daughter - who will have to be born.
The dream of the little bourgeois paradise, that obstinately and obsessively Adriana returns to contemplate, it’s, on the contrariy, the middle class hell, that Mino always hastens to disprove.
But Mino doesn’t detest only the middle class as a bankrupt class, but he has a deep aversion toward the whole human genre; this shows that the description of Mino is an alienate intellectual one of his class: this intellectual, figured in Mino, has learned by Marx and Freud only the negative lesson, the sentence of the middle class; in fact Moravia doesn't believe in any historical alternative to the bourgeois world:
The rich are horrible... but the poors, also for different reason, aren’t certain good.
In those conditions it remains to Mino only the suicide, because he is after all a negative hero, also admitting that his purpose was to change the world.