Success. This is the north star that orients the lives of Stelio and Angiòla, who are more than a couple and perhaps even a family. He is a visionary architect, she his perfect complement. They are megalomaniacs, fragile and always poised. At least until the dream becomes reality and the 50-year-old architect is suddenly transformed into an international star. Around them, before them and after them, the disjointed fragments of a family that spans the twentieth century and explodes into the new millennium. In a villa in the Roman belt, in Italianized Eritrea, in an apartment in the heart of the Marais, in the foggy Venice of the early 1970s and in the stalls of the swirling 1989 Socialist Party congress, the fates of the characters in this novel branch out. Anita, the eldest daughter devoid of obvious talents and ambitions; her brother Tullio, a cartoonist in a constant creative block and crushed by the weight of family; her sister Olivia, ephibic, headstrong, unable to realize her dream of becoming a tennis champion. And then his parents, uncles, and lifelong companions.

Lucio Pellegrini tells the story of a bourgeois family in a hell of aspirations, incapacity, envy and betrayal, straddling the years of Tangentopoli and the last fires of a “short century” that produced, as children of a lesser God, tepid generations if not already lost.