20-year-old Marco is remarkably attuned to the suffering of people everywhere. He writes poetry but turns to drugs and drink to achieve “the forgetting”, that unconscious state that is impenetrable to his existential angst and other fears. He’s fleeing pain but above all, he’s fleeing from himself. When he goes to work for the cleaners’ cooperative at Bambin Gesù Hospital, he’s sure that this experience, the contact with sick children, will be the death of him.

Tangled up with blackmail and crooked cops, the son of a former gangster seeks out his father's old friends, who risk everything to save him.