Filippo Luna
Saverio Lamanna, a journalist turned spokesman for an influential government politician, is fired after committing imprudence at work. Defeated both emotionally and professionally, Saverio decides to leave Rome and return to Màkari, his birthplace in Sicily: here he rediscovers a great passion that has remained dormant for years, that of the writer. Driven by the curiosity that characterizes him, Saverio decides to improvise as an investigator and investigate the various local cases, forming an unlikely trio together with the eccentric and light-hearted friend Peppe Piccionello and the determined architecture student Suleima.
Montelusa, Sicily, Italy, 1877. Giovanni Bovara, the new chief inspector of the mills, is charged with collecting a severe tax. Sicilian by birth, but Ligurian by adoption, he reasons and speaks as a man of northern Italy and does not understand the dynamics of the law of silence that regulate the Sicilian land, so his intransigence immediately gives him several enemies…
Valeria, young secretary of a producer, lives with an eccentric mother and secretly writes for a successful screenwriter, Alessandro. One day, she receives an unusual present from a stranger: it’s the plot of a movie about the mysterious but really-happened theft of a famous Caravaggio’s painting.
In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the silence and complicity that surround her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance.
A Sicilian family deals with the arrival of a group of immigrants on their island.
The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.
