«I know how things go with prison», he writes, «everyone hates prison. Some love the prison of others, so to speak»: talking about it is an unavoidably political gesture, because by looking at the prison you look at the heart of society, but this is also and first of all a personal book, in which everything - portraits, reflections, chronicles, memories - is sewn together by the clear and engaging writing of Daria Bignardi.

"Prison is like the Amazon jungle, like a country at war, a remote island, an extreme place where survival is the priority and the primary feelings are clear": maybe this is why, as a narrator attracted by the places where "man is illuminated by day"Daria Bignardi entered prison 30 years ago for the first time. Since then the prisons has never stopped attending them: he collaborated with the newspaper of San Vittore, brought on TV his conversations with prisoners, accompanied his three-month-old daughter in the parlor to meet his reclusive grandfather, has remained in contact with many detainees and is still an "Article 78", authorized to collaborate in cultural activities taking place in prison. He met with robbers, robbers, drug dealers, mobsters, terrorists and murderers, talked to prison police officers, judges, school directors. To write about that world she retired for months on a tiny island: Linosa. But the prison chased her there too. And the meetings and life on the island have entered into deep dialogue with the stories seen and heard in prison. Bignardi tells us about his journey in isolation and in prisons, even inside, with the unique voice with which he has always managed to transport us to the center of the experiences, starting from himself, putting himself in play, as he did on the morning of 9 March 2020 in a video shot in front of San Vittore, while some detainees climbed the roof joining the riots that were breaking out in many Italian prisons. Thirteen people would die as a result of these events.