On the night of May 10, 1944, Pietro, a literature professor and communist partisan, escapes from the Germans and fascists who are raking the Marsiliana scrub by taking refuge in a frantic run inside a ruin: it is what remains of the ancient Stachilagi fortress , immersed and hidden for centuries in the dark green of the Tuscan Maremma. There the protagonist finds a parchment, written in Latin and dating back to eight hundred years earlier. In it a friar recounts his unhappy fate of having been unjustly accused of heresy and for this reason walled up alive in the basement of a medieval abbey. The religious, friar Sabino, asks anyone who finds his writing to discover the truth about his miserable end. Peter will have to decipher his mysterious words: “Die plenae lunae, miser monachus monasterii Selvae, sub antiquo olivae arbore lacrimans, stabat in spelunca in conspectum Domini ante Cathedralis Sovanae Crucem”. And so, in a land that has just been freed from the Nazi-fascist delirium, while the wounded hearts of men try to heal with courage, the protagonist will walk backwards into the abyss of time. An ancient book that speaks of a Benedictine abbey and the eight friars who lived there; a painting hidden and forgotten under the dust of the centuries; and then others
unforeseen events: all this will forcefully creep into Pietro's simple daily life, between the classrooms and the house where he now lives alone with his mother Norina. From the library of the town of Manciano to the darkness of the crypt of the church of Santa Fiora, from the austere cathedral of Sovana to the mighty tuff wall of Pitigliano: in the frame of the seasons that mark the days with their colours, each stage will add a tile to a mosaic paradoxically increasingly obscure. We will have to wait for the last piece so that the disturbing truth of Friar Sabino is finally revealed to the world, together with his tragic fate.