In 1943 Cagliari experienced some of the saddest days in its history: the “flying fortresses”, the large American fighter planes, repeatedly bombed it, destroying entire neighbourhoods and transforming it into an enormous battlefield.
The war seen through the eyes of a child. A child with Down syndrome who is unfortunate enough to have an extremely ignorant father, and certainly not a “paragon of sensitivity”. Giovanni Battista Puddu, factotum of the Court of Cagliari, spends his free time learning the Duce’s phrases by heart; his greatest aspiration is to be able to give the country a large number of male children to send to conquer the empire! So when, during the fourth year of marriage, after two girls, his wife finally gives him his first male child, Giovanni Battista can’t contain himself. However, within a couple of months, his happiness turns into desperation when the family doctor tells him that the long-awaited male child has a serious illness that will prevent him from parading in the Balilla uniform. Giovanni Battista decides to keep the little one hidden at home, as if it were a shame. Paradoxically, it was thanks to the war, to the alarms that began to ring in all the neighborhoods of Cagliari in 1943, that the child was able to leave his prison-house for the first time, run happily through the streets of the Villanova neighborhood to the Terrapieno shelter and get to know a world that until then had been kept hidden from him.
