Synopsis

At the ankle of Italy's boot, where the Pezzillo bone lies, our hero, Isidoro Sifflotin, is born. In the little house of Mattinella, which has stood for three hundred years and "will never collapse," the prodigious little boy Isidoro hones a miraculous gift, inherited somehow from Quirino, his cross-eyed, poetic, and communist father, and Stella, his pasta-making mother. What is this gift? The simplest: Isidoro can whistle, and he whistles prodigiously. With his inseparable yellow-spotted Indian blackbird, Ali, and the help of a wild-eyed gang, he creates a new language, complete with a whistle-blower, and a revolutionary message magically begins to spread. Just as the vision for a happy humanity free from want is about to take shape, something happens that turns Isidoro's existence upside down. “Everything that grows comes apart”: with this teaching from his mother Stella in his heart, Isidoro, now a boy, discovers Naples and stumbles, without even realizing it, upon another prodigious and silent language: that of love.