On 8 September 1943 captain Mario Zipoli, like many other Italian soldiers, was held by the Germans and then shut in a series of camps after refusing both to join the Republican Fascist Party and to work with the Third Reich and the SS. Published on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation, the volume gives an anthology of the diary he kept during the five hundred and eighty-six days of his internment. His captivity is set beside that, suffered by chance, of a redstart.