Saverio Lamanna and Peppe Piccionello, the Laurel and Hardy couple of the Italian detective story starring in the successful TV series Màkari, brave inland Sicily along the ancient “magna via francigena” that connects by paths and provincial roads, Palermo to Agrigento. But in their wake occur some violent deaths that are mysterious to decipher.
«No Peppe, it is not a good road. It's just a big road, a Magna Via.»
Saverio Lamanna must leave the restful sea of Màkari. His father, the Professor, urged on by his friend Mimì, has set off, in defiance of his age, on a pilgrimage on foot from Palermo to Agrigento, following the trazzere regie that date all the way back to the time of Frederick II. Xavier sets off in pursuit of the two as Stanley did with Livingstone, and he knows he will plunge as if «inside a French play in which everyone seems happily mad». And indeed the expedition is completed with the participation of the unwary Pigeon and his garland of flip-flops, and the wise Suleima in logistics. In the innermost villages that are becoming depopulated emptied by constant emigration, in the belly of the countryside of a remote and archaic Sicily - which is then the Sicily of which «I would never be able to get rid even by running away» -, far from the sea, far from the cities, the characters and situations offer an adventure on the road, which caresses comedy and mystery at each strange encounter, to always remain ambiguously on the brink of it: almost in a flickering, dream-like image. Because, in the escapism, in the fun, in the impertinence of the dialogues and in the paradox of the unexpected (Savatteri does not hide the memory of Jerome K. Jerome's hilarious Three Men Wandering), the protagonist Saverio Lamanna's desire to go and relive his childhood and to recover, before it is too late, his true relationship with his father grows.