It is 1977. At nineteen Francesca Woodman is in Rome for a study stay: the daughter of artists and a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she finds in Rome the place and moment where the aesthetic suggestions she had cultivated in America reach full maturity. A precocious artist, a figure on the border between American and Italian culture, she draws her artistic arc within photography but beyond its banks: echoes of Surrealism, the body as language, the influence of Breton together with American photography. She transforms herself using the two tools of her magic game, the body and the camera, and at the centre of her work lies the topos of Metamorphosis as a continuation of life. As a woman and an artist she teaches the power of the artistic gesture and the courage that creating and exposing oneself require. The book also gathers the memories of her friends, met between the Maldoror bookshop in via del Parione and the studios of the Nuova Scuola Romana.