The halved are men and women living half a life. The last people clinging to the slopes of the Adamello, defending the trees that stood there before. Eleonora, who searched for her mother for thirty-five years. Elisa, born hearing to deaf parents. A man looking for others like him, and for a cure for himself. The White Dwarf, who is a little under a metre tall.

The halved are also people with a double life: Lena, who works in children's publishing and in the making of pornographic films; Luca, who runs corporate team-building in the woods and who once enlisted in the Foreign Legion; Irina, who works as a carer in one country to build a house in another. And halved are places too: a laundry on the edge of Milan holding two worlds divided by a curtain, a village in Liguria crossed by a wall that does not exist.

The whole volume is run through by pictures from the archive of the former psychiatric hospital San Niccolò in Siena. Gathered over more than a hundred and fifty years, it holds fifty thousand clinical files and more than twenty thousand pictures — service images made to identify patients, for internal use only. Forty were chosen here, to tell the border between inside and outside, between health and illness, between mind and body.