La serpe

In a dusk-drenched Italian province, Mario Sirchi—a composer whose symphonies tremble between dusk and dawn—finds his life cleaved by a single, metallic shriek: a body at the foot of the old bell tower, blood freckling the limestone like wild pomegranate. Within hours, carabinieri clap irons on him; the town’s gossip-machines grind; the maestro’s baton is swapped for a jailer’s key. While he rots in a cell scribbling counterpoints on cigarette papers, Adonella—his muse, his lover, the flame-haired soprano who first sang his nocturne—unravels her own lineage. A sealed letter, a cracked photograph, a whispered lullaby: they all point to Nayda, a twin-shadowed sister raised in silence across the river among charcoal-burners and washerwomen. Adonella’s hunt for the real killer becomes a twin odyssey: exonerate Mario, resurrect Nayda. Through candle-lit archives, moonlit ossuaries, and the rust-scented corridors of the asylum where memories are kept in straightjackets, she reconstructs the night’s counter-melody: a councilman’s scam, a forged will, a stiletto borrowed from the opera’s prop trunk. The final reckoning occurs inside the amphitheater during a thunderstorm; as Mario conducts his own Requiem in absentia, Nayda steps from the wings—face to face with the sister who never knew her, both women now instruments in a score of guilt and absolution.