Marcello Santilli dreams of opening a restaurant and becoming a famous chef, but the bank wants its debt repaid and scratching lottery tickets won't do it. Then Santilli hears about a town in southern Italy whose entire population is over the age of eighty. Seeing an easy way to solve his problems, Santilli opens a funeral home and waits for the corpses to roll in. The days pass, but not a single oldtimer has the decency to croak. When winter comes, Santilli catches pneumonia. Now it's the oldtimers who tend to the undertaker. A relationship based on the certainty of death becomes one based on the hope of life.