We are not pure spirits. We are bodies that inhabit a space, and the way we live in it reflects and expresses our being, its qualities and pathologies. The protagonists in these six stories have, in various ways, a particular relationship with their living space that defines their existence like a missed appointment, a useless waiting in a no man’s land for realization and joy that have declared perpetual unwillingness. In these stories, little tranche de vie, at times the home suffocates and oppresses the protagonists; at others, it dominates precisely through its absence (one of the most intense manifestations of presence, Sartre would have said). There are Carlo and Laura Dadda who construct their entire life around a living room that becomes their ruination; there are Raffaele and Antonietta, notaries from generations so involved in demonstrating their wealth to the world that they do not see the humiliations that constrain them; there are Luca Spiazzi, a calloused single, happy to have escaped the peril of marriage and Stefano Trotti who works fourteen hours a day to maintain an apartment in which, at night, exhausted, he only sleeps; then there are the Cutrupi, a married couple; he is a decadent aristocrat, she the daughter of a baker become rich, and they are both slaves, in different ways, to an ancient palace. There’s Demetrio Rota who buys a one-way ticket for New York in order to escape the house built by his father in Calabria. A home that became a prison. Six stories set in six different cities that unreel towards the inevitable result, and only the protagonists like Edipo, seem not to realize anything and one after the other travel the steps of their Way of the Cross, until that result that makes them face the evidence of their failure. Ermanno Bencivenga’s return to narrative draws from daily life to paint a grand fresco of the Italians’ relationship to their homes.