The story takes plays during the annual Good Friday pageant in a tiny Italian village. Local priest Don Vincenzo faces a crisis when the girl selected to play the Virgin Mary shows up pregnant.
A Sicilian nobleman is very jealous of his mistress and when she gets married flies off his handle and commits a murder of which an innocent man is accused. He is however tormented by his conscience.
In Romagna, an Italian district, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the owners of an estate are the professor Edoardo, always lost in reveries, and his wife Maria. They have a son, Robertino, who has a friend: Zvanin. Zvanin is the son of Mingòn and Marianna, two peasants. Dolly is an...
Salvatore, known as "bread loaf", escapes from Caltanissetta's brewery to find his mother he never met. Before arriving in Venice, he stays in a small sea village where he meets people of various kinds.
Unlike most Italian films of the 1940s, Augusto Genina's Cielo Sulla Palude opened in Venice rather than Rome. The film's American title was Heaven Over the Marshes, and indeed most of the story is set in the disease-ridden Pontine Marshes on the outskirts of Rome. This was the home of Maria...