A former professor finds no more reason to be in the world, so he takes a train to Genoa and arrives on the shore of an icy winter sea. At the end of his journey, he winds up in an ancient abbey of Boschetto where the desperately homeless live. Waiting for the warden to take him in he walks around the cloisters thinking about his life. Is it everything in our lives already written in the stars or it’s all a coincidence? Then he gradually meets the guests of a limbo that welcomes and does not judge them. Each of them tells him their stories: between them there is a carabiniere, a countess, a railroader, a ship's deckhand; a whole humanity in its colorful diversity as in the backstage of the world. At the end of the film, he feels better than before, and he left this place to live his last years.