Marco Tullio Sperelli is a professor of Italian language for children from the region of Liguria in northern Italy. Due to a failure of the Ministry of Education, he is transferred not to another northern town, but instead a similar-sounding town near Naples, in southern Italy. There he finds a school where the students, teachers and parents deal with the poverty of the south in a resigned and practical manner that he feels are unworthy of the morality, ethics and education children should learn. (For example, most of the children avoid school because they must work for a living to help support their families).