It is 1957 when Giana, a 19-year-old student of political science at the Catholic University of Milan, meets an economics scholar with a lanky gait and sweet Giottesque eyes. He is Nino Andreatta, destined to become the love of her life and a major figure in recent Italian history. In Giana's account flows their life together, from first meeting to marriage to family, retraced through memories of minute, everyday and private events, alternating between before and after and preferring to the chronological order the entirely interior one of feelings. A dense, precise narrative, ignited by flashes of irony and illuminating details. In parallel, Nino Andreatta's academic and public engagements unravel, then his government appointments, until the rupture, that "crack of meaning that turns the whole world into an abyss"': cardiac arrest, years of silence and waiting, the end. "It Was All Light" is the story of a great love, it is a story of people but also a fragment of social history: in the events of an Italian family from the postwar years to the present and a passionate ruling class, a portrait of a committed bourgeoisie emerges that prefers discretion to clamor.