A story of fathers and children that flows, like the Sebeto, a lost river buried under the streets of Naples, beneath the surface of legitimate lives, only to reemerge in the shadows.
Chiaretta is nine years old and can’t smile. And although she can laugh, no one can see her do it. As the result of a birth defect, she remains stony-faced when the response is triggered in her brain. There’s only one person who can see when she’s laughing: her father, Carmine. No one but him.One morning in March, while they’re taking a stroll in the old Spanish Quarter of Naples, Chiaretta suddenly loses sight of her father. He vanishes. No one is much bothered: it’s not the first time in the last few years that Carmine has disappeared and then returned home. But Chiaretta is worried and she tries to find out what’s happened to him. She ends up knocking at the door of Tony Perduto, a freelance journalist living alone in the Spanish Quarter. Tony is suspicious to when he opens the door to her, but then he listens to her tale and gets i). sucked into a mystery. Little by little, reluctantly and in opposition to everyone, he begins to build a meticulous investigation, guided only by his curiosity, against the background of the teeming voices that animate the alleyways of Naples.
