Salento, June 1934. A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a village with only a few souls. A couple get off: the man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home; the woman, Anna – his wife – is from the North. She is as beautiful as a Greek statue, but sad and worried: what kind of life awaits her in this unfamiliar land?

In the eyes of the villagers, Anna never ceases to be “the foreigner” who doesn’t attend church, doesn’t wander around the village and doesn’t gossip. Proud and prickly, Anna never yields to the customs of Southern women: not only does she take the postal services public exam, but actually passes it and becomes the first postwoman in the village, or rather the first “letter carrier”, as she wants to be called.

For over twenty years, Anna is the invisible thread that brings the village residents and their stories together. First on foot, then by bicycle, proud in her navy blue cap and uniform, Anna delivers letters from the young men at the front, postcards from emigrants and missives from secret lovers. Without meaning to – and above all without the villagers wanting it – the letter carrier changes many things in Lizzanello.

Emanuele’s father is a Jungian psychologist, a magician capable of healing wounded souls. As a child, Emanuele soon learns that in order to survive in his father’s orbit it’s best for him to be a peripheral figure. After all, his mother keeps saying “You know what he’s like” whenever she talks about his father. But Emanuele doesn’t really know and, after his father dies, very little is left of him except an apartment no one wants, where the invisible mists of the lives and sorrows he had healed, oiled and straightened still linger.

So Emanuele decides to buy this flat and to live permanently in that atmosphere still hovering after his father’s life was cut short, because – first as a son, then as a writer – he wants to reconstruct the identity of a man who never left anything of himself in writing.

The Zanetta sisters arrive in a Milan buzzing with the 1906 world fair and subscribe to Socialist dreams, although the youngest is arrested for defeatism in the years immediately after Caporetto. In 1920 Trentino-Alto Adige the air is good for those with health conditions and Doctor K. thinks he is at the heart of a spying intrigue arising from the correspondence with his translator Milena Jesenská. In Venice, the daughter of the great American poet Ezra Pound wanders across the city unaware that she is being spied on by a boy with whom she shared her childhood. Finally, the young Albert O. Hirschman joins his sister and brother-in-law in Trieste, a city fuelled by the hedonistic, commercial spirit of its proudly Italian middle classes, those same middle classes that will shortly see their world struck by racial laws, like the most unthinkable and dreadful of unforeseen events.

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