On February 7, 2020, Patrick Zaki returns to his home in Cairo from Bologna, where he is studying. He wants to stay a few days. It is just the break of a student returning home temporarily. But things do not go as planned: Zaki is arrested and remains in prison for 20 months. Bologna, his university, and all of Italy react and have not stopped demonstrating since that February 7. Patrick Zaki in this book tells his story: what really happened that day and what happened then, in the days that followed: the interrogations, the isolation, the torture, the confrontation with a world - that of prisons - in which everyone is reduced to an inhuman condition. And what kept him alive: his studies, his passion for soccer, music, the affection of his loved ones, his beloved Reny, and all of Italy.

"Hope is the reason I exist and tell my story. Hope came to me from the first moment I saw a person who loved me and decided to risk and face everything for me, a family who did not know what was happening, but chose to stand by their son's side, whatever his choices were. I will always be grateful for all the love and hope that surrounded me. I will remain faithful to this disease of hope with which you have infected me, until the prisons, full of free people, are empty."