A mother and daughter found dead in their flat in Rome: that is the beginning. A mother and daughter, with their three small dogs, found dead in their flat in Sesto San Giovanni: that is the end.

In between there is the account of an anonymous writer who spent a week in a psychiatric ward; the story of Antonio Russo, a urologist from Naples who is the biggest Italian collector of Barbie dolls; a stop at the Lido di Venezia to meet Roberto Saoner, keeper — and son of the keeper — of the Palazzo del Cinema; the men who for decades have gathered unexploded ordnance along the Piave; a report from the artificial paradise of Rosignano Solvay; a meeting on a train with a young man who works aboard ocean liners and hunts in virtual worlds; a journey on the tracks of the wolf in Valchiusella; and love and its wreck inside a large house in Tuscany.

And then sixty-four pages of colour pictures by Mattia Balsamini, sent to a small house in the Monti Pisani where a woman gathers and keeps dozens and dozens of objects, the residue of other people's lives.

A book of true stories grafted one into the other, and the first of the Libri della vertigine.