San Benedetto del Tronto, Christmas Eve 1970: the fishing boat Rodi sinks near the port, before the eyes of the town. Salvage operations to recover the bodies are delayed and a revolt breaks out in the town. Thus began a decade of militancy that would end in 1981, with the tragic kidnapping of Roberto Peci, brother of the first turncoat of the Red Brigades. Tracing the stories of those boys who dreamed of revolution is Aldo Sciamanna in a lysergic night spent in Turin's military prison. Theirs are lives destined to disappear, annihilated by violence and the most implacable instrument of repression in the early 1980s: heroin. It is heroin that transforms the Rotonda di San Benedetto from a political centre into a receptacle for ‘plague victims’, the theatre of a self-destruction functional to power. Thus the 15-year-old Mari witnesses the fall, cruel and docile, of a generation. In this climate (recently defined by a historian as the ‘glaciation of the 1980s’), only literature can give back the word to those willing to be saved.