From the story by Massimo Scognamiglio
Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.
Logline
Tuscany, summer 1980. Four fourteen-year-olds find a black cube that has floated down from the sky on a parachute. Eight days later they are at Bologna station. Only one survives, and the cube never leaves him.
The story
They call him the Mute. With Cicca, Duccio and Benvenuti he spends his nights stargazing in a corner of the Maremma the locals call La California. On the morning of 25 July 1980 something drifts down on a parachute: a cube five centimetres wide, light as nothing, that no hammer can scratch. At night it oozes a white slime that smells of death. Once, in the dark of a railway tunnel, it says his name.
On 2 August the four boys take the train to Bologna, where the girls they met at the beach are waiting. Vanni runs back to the carriage for the rucksack he forgot. The others stay in the second-class waiting room.
Then comes the Milan of the eighties, easy money, the tycoon going into politics. And two Americans who have spent thirteen years looking for an object launched a hundred and forty thousand years ago from a planet that may no longer exist.
Notes
A science fiction story set inside real events: the Bologna station bombing, Milan in the eighties, the early nineties. The tone is that of a coming-of-age story, with the Tuscan dialect spoken by the four boys.
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