Sitting on a hospital windowsill, a boy talks to two pigeons. They are the only ones listening to his story—the story of a small man different from the others, different from those with athletic build, "girlfriends and footballs," those who seem to possess things. He reads. He watches. He stays with himself, opening his astonished gaze on a world that reveals itself full of contradictions as he searches for his own maturity. And for work—the kind no one else wants to do: cleaning the city. Through the refuse of other people's lives, his path to growth unfolds. He wants to become a man. He wants to know the world. His teammates help him, especially Signor Lupo, his boss and instructor, a true master of life—rough and tender, profoundly honest—who will give him his "name as a man." No longer Paolino ("What kind of name is that? Does it sound human to you?") but Stramonio, named after the plant that grows beside the garbage.
But the world is not what Stramonio expected. Beyond the sheltered universe of the trash, people cultivate different kinds of filth—filth of the soul, cynicism, deceit, and when it suits them, even murder. And when he encounters this outer reality, seizing a public occasion where those who decide human fate have gathered, he will perform his first great act as a man. An act of extreme rebellion. What could be more just than returning to their rightful owners their own "essence"? So, weeping and laughing, Stramonio closes the arc of his formation—the story of what he has seen and lived, the very story he now tells, sitting on a hospital windowsill, to two inattentive pigeons.