[1] Severino Balestra, a peddler who goes around the various village festivals of the Po delta selling trinkets, returns to Migliarino, where three elderly people live who make ends meet with a few barber jobs, or poaching eels.

In the evening, after unsuccessfully trying to spend the night with Marina in the inn, Severino stops by the three elderly people and here proposes them a deal: the sale of pieces of the sky, which will make them rich because they will be able to get the rent paid from the planes.

He meets Marina again and this time the girl, who is in any case attracted by Severino's cialtronesca sympathy, does not reject him and goes away with him among the reeds.

The three meanwhile, after the failed dive into the water, get drunk, but they really run the risk of drowning because the old boat on which they live goes out to sea and sinks.

In the end Severino, happy that nothing has happened, gives back to the elderly the money he had had as an advance of that hectare of sky they wanted to buy and leaves because the village festival is over.