Contare i passi verso casa

A raw, daring and deeply moving story about motherhood, guilt and the courage to reinvent oneself, told with disarming honesty and surprising tenderness.

A woman on the run from herself and from a painful secret finds refuge in a zoo – a strange, magical place that, against all odds, becomes her true home.

Alba has changed everything: her name, her city, her life. She now lives alone in a small flat inside the zoo where she works as a keeper. Before this, she was a girl raised on the margins, an author of illustrated children’s books, and a mother who made a choice she has never stopped running from.

By day, Alba cares for cages and tanks. By night, she draws stories she never signs. A dark-eyed little girl returns to her dreams, without ever calling her by name. Alba protects a secret with the same stubbornness with which she avoids mirrors: a house by a river, a family left behind, a decision that weighs like an unredeemable fault.

When a man in his fifties suddenly appears at the zoo asking for her, Alba’s carefully built isolation begins to crack. Forced to stop running, she must decide whether to keep hiding especially from herself, or to confront the past and discover whether, beyond fear and guilt, there is still room to become a mother again.