The Bandit of Port Avon

Moonlit contraband pulses through the Ligurian alleys of 1914 Port Avon, a fishing village painted in chiaroscuro where Giuseppe De Witten’s nameless smuggler—part Rimbaud, part Saint-Just—glides across the wharfs like a black-market Mercury, pockets swollen with anarchist pamphlets and uncut emeralds. Roberto Roberti’s customs officer, a repressed Dante who tallies sins instead of crates, stalks him through fog thick as wet wool, while Giulio Donadio’s one-armed war veteran circles both men like a damaged gull, hungry for redemption and brandy. Claudia Zambuto’s apothecary-poet grinds chalky powders that could pass for cocaine or communion wafers, trading kisses for intelligence; Bice Valerian’s countess-in-exile drifts through crumbling palazzos trailing ostrich feathers and the scent of gun-oil, bargaining her jewels for passage to Caracas. Oreste Visalli’s lighthouse keeper, eyes calcified by salt, projects forbidden lantern-slide images onto the clouds, turning night itself into a secret cinema. The plot coils around a single moonless shipment: twenty crates of rifles meant for North African rebels, buried inside marble saints. Betrayals ricochet faster than flintlock sparks; identities dissolve in harbour water; a final pistol shot inside the bell tower reverberates so loudly that every gull in the province takes flight at once, blotting out the dawn.