The original text was composed in the Sicilian dialect of Agrigento.

The title character is a middle-aged single father by choice.

He tries to sell one of his boys to Zio Simone, a crabby elderly man, who becomes offended by the offer.

He then has an encounter with Mita, a former lover, who tells him that he is the father of her unborn child.

It is the work of his Sicilian origins and in place of the fractured perspective of illusion and reality its view of the world is as down-to-earth as a primitive painting with landscape and figures equally expressive of the one theme of fecundity.