Forced to tend the animals on board, a storm casts him adrift in the ocean on the back of a pig until he reaches the coast and is rescued by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Sensing that his Seville audience was hostile as well, Fo improvised a story that would eventually serve as the basis of Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas.
After several episodes in which he witnesses violent antisemitism in the form of auto da fe and financial fraud committed against Jews who flee such violence, Johan is conscripted as part of Christopher Columbus's crew, where tends the livestock in the ship's hold.
Fo researched the journals of a number of European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and wrote the play in a dialect that drew upon the Lombardian, Venetian, Catalanian, Castilian, Provençal, Portuguese and Arabic.
[3] In 2002, the play was adapted into an animation film directed by Giulio Cingoli, Venetian Rascal Goes to America (Italian: Johan Padan e la descoverta de le Americhe).