Faithful adaptation of a story by Tomasi di Lampedusa on the encounter between a man and a mermaid, for the television series Ten Italian directors, ten Italian short stories , in which Gianni Amelio, Luigi Comencini, Carlo Lizzani participated among others.
Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it.
The film is inspired by the Mário de Sá-Carneiro short story, where the narration is made by Professor Antena's assistant who walks by his side when he is run over in a perhaps enigmatic way.
When a dedicated jockey finds that the local politicians are not to be trusted and begins to feel his romance with a beautiful woman slowly slipping away, his last-ditch effort to risk it all for his trusted horse Palomo shows that sometimes animals are truly man's best friend.