"A shit junkie. A different one. A Disposable Body. One of those who are said, in the jargon of certain cops, to have their names on the registry written in pencil. Because erasing it is a snap. And no one will come and complain."
Stefano Cucchi's death is one of those news events that mark a generation and a piece of Italian history. Because it is a symbolic affair, loaded with very heavy meanings: the violence of Power, the fragility of the rule of law, the inability of the Italian state to come to terms with the responsibilities of its servants, the danger that a boy runs who ends up in the hands of men who wear the uniform of those who guarantee our security or the white coat of those who protect our health.
Carlo Bonini, a great signature of "Repubblica" and author of Acab and Suburra (with Giancarlo De Cataldo), for seven years has closely followed the Cucchi case-through the reading of tens of thousands of pages of court documents, interviews with family members, and the study of medical-legal expert reports and counter-expertises on the causes of death-and in this book, which is a true civil inquiry told with the tools of the most pressing narrative, he puts at the center the first and last witness to the truth about what happened: the body of the offender.
Stefano's corpse. Which will unveil the stages of his ordeal through the eyes and science of a doctor who, by a coincidence as precise as a response, will be the same one called upon to interpret the signs of torture inflicted on Giulio Regeni, slaughtered in Egypt and trapped in a dark story so different and so similar to that of Stefano Cucchi.
For it is time to let that tortured corpse speak, to make him tell what he knows and what some would not have wanted him to say, and to explain to all of us, who may not want to listen, how much our bodies are at the mercy of Power, State, and History.

Stefano Cucchi is dead. The State that had taken him into custody returned only a corpse. But that corpse speaks. And we all must listen to it.