A strange love story between a devoted young nun and a young Marxist determined to help run the hospital wards where the nun is the head nurse.

Luigi Tagrana, a hopeless social outcast living on the industrial outskirts of northern Italy, scrapes together a meager living by gathering worms to sell as bait. His days are spent in a bleak, repetitive cycle of labor and solitude amidst a decaying landscape, moving in and out of hospitals and prisons where he is treated as a number rather than a person.

Don Michele, a young priest from Puglia, arrives in Rome when he is called by his uncle Mimi.