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Michele Modugno, a bricklayer from Puglia with a passion for music, lives in a large trullo with his elderly mother, his sister Melania, and his brother-in-law Sebastiano, also a bricklayer and his business partner. To pay off a bank debt, Michele rents a small seaside trullo he owns for the summer. The day before hosting tourist Giada, he receives a nasty surprise: someone has stolen the stones that form the cone from the trullo. Michele looks for other accommodations for the tourist, but ultimately is forced to take her into his own home. Living with Giada, a beautiful Milanese manager, wreaks havoc on the poor bricklayer's life. The two, with their different personalities and lifestyles, initially clash and argue about everything. But then, slowly, they discover their attraction to each other, and a beautiful yet unlikely love story begins.

A road comedy with three parallel stories: 1.) Two Matera natives who are supposed to be extras who gets lost searching for a film set. 2.) The location manager, a widower harassed by his superior, who meets an American director in Matera to film a documentary about Albino Pierro, a poetic figure who restores a forgotten sense of life. 3.) Director of the film commission, harassed by stronger powers, who ends up taking out all his frustration on the location manager. Looming over everything, somewhere between reality and fiction, is the imminent start of filming on the mega-production James Bond.

Sassiwood is a parody of Matera, a small town in Southern Italy, that seems destined only to accommodate biblical movie sets. It is a bitter reflection on the death of poetry and the ignorance of the ruling class.