I millepiedi

A charcoal-dark fable unfurls inside a crumbling Italian atelier where puppet-maker Sabatelli, her fingers tattooed with varnish, breathes life into a limber centipede carved from violin spruce. The creature—jointed, restless, a thousand feet tapping like hailstones—scuttles beyond the workbench, dragging behind it every secret the town wishes buried: adulterous letters, bastard birth certificates, a priest’s pilfered chalice. Alicine, the watchmaker’s orphaned daughter, trails the arthropod through moon-slick alleys, her lantern guttering against the frescoed walls while the fascist carabiniere Senatra prowls for subversives. Each segment of the centipede carries a whispered confession; each leg leaves a vermilion print on the travertine. By the time the beast reaches the Roman aqueduct at dawn, the entire village has been turned inside-out like a glove, its hypocrisies exposed to the raw January air. The final shot—an extreme close-up of the creature dissolving into sawdust—feels less like defeat than like a merciful exorcism, as though history itself were shrugging off another skin.