In 1943 Cagliari experienced some of the saddest days in its history: the B17s, the American “flying fortresses” repeatedly bombed the city, destroying entire neighborhoods and transforming it into a huge battlefield. The war seen through the eyes of a child. A child with Down syndrome who was 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 time learning the Duce’s phrases by heart; his greatest aspiration is to be able to give the country one, two, many sons… to send to conquer the empire! So when, in the fourth year of marriage, after two daughters, his wife finally gives him his first son, Giovanni Battista can’t wait. However, in the space of a couple of months, happiness turns into desperation: the man discovers that the long-awaited son has serious mental problems; he certainly won’t be able to see him parade in the Balilla uniform. So he decides to keep the little one hidden at home, as if it were a shame. Paradoxically, it will be thanks to the war, to the alarms that from 1943 began to ring in all the neighborhoods of Cagliari, that the child will be able to leave his house-prison for the first time, run happily through the streets of the Villanova neighborhood up to the Terrapieno shelter and get to know a world that until then had been kept hidden from him.
