"Welcome to the new world. From the Gutenberg galaxy (1450) we have moved in a flash to the Zuckerberg galaxy, dominated by the master of Facebook (but also of Instagram and WhatsApp) and the other four kingdoms that rule it (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google): all together, in 2020, the year desertified by the pandemic, they saw their profits grow by more than $1 trillion, 5 percent of U.S. GDP. A leap of civilization." Publishing is going through a dizzying transition. In Italy in 2000, 6 million daily newspapers were sold. By June 2020, the total had plummeted to 1.3 million. Everything is marching toward the cloud as the physicality of paper, print centers, outlets and editorial staff dematerializes. It is a reflection of the social phenomenon that determines our age: an unstoppable revolution that transforms us into digital immigrants, inhabitants of a world where the here and now is most valuable.
And yet, there is still a way of doing journalism that searches, rummages, throws official truths to the wind, without neglecting any detail, even at the cost of being brutal. Perhaps only in this way can one truly understand something of the events and people who have made and make Italy. From Enzo Tortora to Rosa and Olindo, from Alex Zanardi to Patrick Zaki, from Vallanzasca to the acid couple of Milano bene, Carlo Verdelli tells our story in 40 pieces written on paper (all but the last) and guides us through a rich and tumultuous gallery of cases closed but often left unsolved, of indefatigable fighters and places imbued with plots and symbols. A disturbing and compelling story of who we are and why we have become this way.

"No nostalgia for how we were. No anticipation of how we will be. Only the hope that, in the leap of sorts, the weakness of old newspapers will not translate into weakness of journalists and thus of journalism."

A mosaic of great chronicles, approached with the rigor of the profession and animated by human and civic passion.