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.

Lavinia lives alone in a derelict house and is at the end of her tether, so one day she decides to end it all and jump off a bridge. She is saved by Arthur, a young man with golden locks, who seems to have no identity and no family. So Lavinia decides to invite him to live with her. The young man is actually the prince of a kingdom in a parallel universe. They fall in love but a curse hangs over their relationship. For Arthur, the time has come to return home and claim his rightful throne, but he will not do so unless he can take Lavinia with him.

In a cell in one of the United Kingdom’s most infamous maximum-security jails, Belmarsh prison in London, a man fights the planet’s most powerful institutions, which have been trying to destroy him for over ten years. His name is Julian Assange. Some people are even asking for a death sentence for him, for having broken the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917, which forbade the broadcasting of classified information during World War I. As far as the least visible but most pervasive powers are concerned, Julian Assange is one of the worst criminals alive. He should be punished in the most brutal of ways.

The author first got in touch with him in late July 2009, when his organisation contacted her in the middle of the night: they had a document about Italy and needed a journalist to help them check its authenticity and public interest. From that moment on, they worked together, they for WikiLeaks and she for various press outlets – l’Espresso and La Repubblica at first, now Il Fatto Quotidiano – and published millions of secret documents. She has travelled the world with an encrypted computer and phones; she was robbed in Rome, where very important documents on encrypted memory sticks vanished into thin air; she’s been repeatedly followed abroad; she was spied on at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. And yet despite all that, nobody has ever locked her up in a jail or even questioned her. In these ten years, she has never had to pay the high price Julian Assange is paying: since publishing the secret documents, he has never again been free.

Some of the most famous international investigative journalists and numerous human rights organisations have spoken out in Julian Assange’s defence, and even the Council of Europe and the United Nations have expressed concern and indignation at the crime of torture. The trial in London strongly mobilised public opinion.

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