Synopsis

On February 29, 1944, Ulisse, a fascist squad member and director, was killed by the Patriotic Action Groups. A few months earlier, the seven Cervi brothers had been shot by the fascists. On March 16, 1961, seventeen years later, the GAP member Soragni, known by his nom de guerre Muso, would be the victim of the long-simmering hatred of a fellow militant and friend, who shared his responsibility for Ulisse's murder. History is linear only when we choose to tell it that way, but events unfold in an order that, when it concerns you closely, isn't necessarily chronological. This is true for those who seek to understand the reasons behind bloodshed, when the blood of the oppressors mixes with that of the oppressed. And the echoes of those shots accompany Massimo Zamboni in his investigation across two centuries to reconstruct a story that concerns him very closely, even if it was always kept from him. “Of my grandfather, I possessed only two things: his name, Ulisse, which I bear as my second, and which I have always had to consider an intruder, an unknown part of myself; and a jacket, a rough woolen fabric, the black coarse wool of his autarchic uniform. Nothing else, before this book.” This investigation leads him to breathe dust in the archives, trying to decipher the hostile handwriting of the parish registers; it takes him to the hills of Reggio to interview the survivors; it takes him to the grave of the Cervi brothers – seven, like the seven B* brothers, the wealthy family to which his great-grandfather Massimo belonged.