The writer tells the relationship with the home starting from the house in Sicily where he was born. There the smells of childhood mingle, evoking grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, children shouting and running, in a village torn between archaic roots and the modernity in the air. It is a story of emigration that takes the family first to Mandello del Lario and then to Switzerland, where the walls breathe differently and smells mingle with nostalgia. Family habits between South and North are described in detail, with irony and a veil of melancholy. The veil thickens in the "voices" of the second part, whose protagonists are people forced to abandon their homes: Di Stefano gives voice to emigrants and homeless people with the intimacy of a diary. With his pictures Massimo Siragusa investigates a complicated and intimate relationship: "the house as refuge, meeting place, social status, affirmation of identity, and the absence of a home as the loss of these things". The first section, devoted to the exteriors of buildings in Sicily, shows whole middle-class districts of the sixties in bold plays of volumes and materials, in the tangle of nature, concrete and lime. In the second, the voices are joined by more makeshift and precarious housing: moved, colourful interiors, empty or crammed, of squatted houses, shacks and working-class districts left to decay. Crumbling walls breathe with bodies; places overflowing with objects give back the intimate stories of absent people.