In Gli estinti are true stories of people and places set apart or turned upside down: witnesses of a past that will not pass, prophets of a future that may never come, hidden even when they lie right under our eyes — violent, fossil, gentle, dreaming, contradictory.

A Venetian separatist; the Tuscan who killed Van Damme; the asphalt of Bolzano, the reinforced concrete of Livorno, the petrochemical works of Syracuse. Lara Croft. Rome. A small, failed Italy in the Pacific. A mad monk. The missing. Family trees. A medium who speaks with the dead and who works, for a living, on making websites usable by people who cannot see.

As in the rest of the trilogy, the book is run through by a photographic reportage: the photojournalist Luca Rotondo was sent to the workshop of a taxidermist in Padua and into the homes of people who chose to have their pets stuffed, to defeat time, or perhaps for other reasons.