Published: March 2006 (available from April 2006)
Publisher: Edizioni del Leone (Spinea, Venice - Italy)
Series: Prose
ISBN code: 88-7314-160-9
Cover image: Portrait of a soul, by Riccardo Ciriello (2005).
Notes: The book is divided into three sections: Chronicles from the centre of the night (in a longer version than the 2004 edition), Chronicles from the further night and The perpendicular lives. The book is opened by a prologue and closed by an epilogue. Parts of this work appear in the English-written book Plays published by Edizioni Eva in November 2007 (see section).

the good gardener who has become a forester has a plan of reforestation: he has decided to plant just one seed at a time for each tree that has been felled. even the excess of life ends up being deprivation.

damian freeman, after thirty-five years of long and honourable service as a warder for the prison of his town, although free from any kind of commitments now, keeps on performing his duties as a jailer: every morning, right after waking up, as a first thing he summons all those living inside him, whom he left free to wander through the rooms and the corridors during the night, then he puts them in a line in the yard and, turning each time the same key in a different lock, one after another he shuts them up in their cells again for one more day.

just before the day started, while the air was still dawning and the sun was seeping through the corn which gently swayed at his passage, he had unexpectedly got lost, without even realizing it, adrift in a sea of light.

while trying to explain to his speech therapist what he thinks has been the most striking experience in his life, ted stammerfield, who has been working as a part-time unemployed for years, couldn’t utter a single word: he just mumbled something incoherent, a couple of blurred and confused signs, and then gave up exhausted.
it is difficult for us to understand what this all means, his territories are still unexplored and the valleys are wrapped up in silence. the scene, suffice it to say, was repeated this morning.

but as soon as he gets back home and lies down in the bed where he’s been sleeping alone for twenty years without needing anybody else by his side, his tongue suddenly comes untied and, without being questioned, can remember everything, from the beginning to the end: when he used to sail along the coasts of africa and mornings were made of boundless infinity, when the routes on the oceans were flooded with light and the archipelagoes were perfect ciphers in the shimmering maps of ecstasy.