“Splendid, multifaceted, restless, intense… everywhere there is poetry, the ability to describe life, its disasters, its consolations.”
Carlo Rovelli

Venice. Gregorio Licudis arrives at the hospital where his son and his daughter in law have just had their first child and suggests that the baby be given his name. It’s a name that emerges out of the family’s distant past, echoing down a long line of princes, admirals and patricians of the former Republic of Venice. The family is taken aback: why is this elderly professor suddenly professing allegiance to a world that has disappeared? He had never, up to this point, been prone to family nostalgia, living a successful life as an academic and writer.
The son at first rejects his father’s demands. He’s a businessman with quite different priorities, but while he is travelling for his company in eastern Europe, he begins to pick up the trails of his ancestors. From Constantinople to Moscow, from Astrakhan to Venice.
Alexandra, a beautiful and mysterious Russian is hired to look after Gregorio as he ages, but her role rapidly changes to reveal unexpected twists in the family history.
Old wounds begin to surface: historical and personal disasters such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Second World War have marked the Licudis, the family at the centre of this narrative. Marriages have provided safe havens from catastrophe, but the sentimental narrative in which ancestors have tried to protect their offspring from terrible events now appears as deception. As the revelations pile up, both personal and historical perspectives are turned on their heads. What is the difference between being a somebody and being a nobody? What meanings do we attach to the possession of a profession and a status, and then the loss of both? What is the real legacy, in a family of runaway princes, of being oneself? And finally, what does it signify to invent oneself?