Ufo 78

The end of the 1970s, music and politics, repression and armed struggle, countercultures and ‘substances’, feminism and the fight for abortion rights, punk and the first signs of ‘reflux’, under a sky full of stars. And spaceships. 1978. Aldo Moro is kidnapped and killed. A state of emergency is declared in the cities. ‘Drugs’ break through every barrier. Three popes in the Vatican. The last major social reforms. While all this is happening, more and more Italians are seeing flying saucers, day and night. It is a mass phenomenon, the ‘Great Wave’. Two thousand sightings in the skies above Italy, dozens of ‘close encounters’ with intergalactic travellers. Aliens and spaceships rage in pop culture. Milena Cravero, a young anthropologist, studies UFO enthusiasts in a gloomy and militarised Turin. Martin Zanka, a successful writer, has told stories of ancient cosmonauts, but he is tired of his persona and tired of Rome. His son Vincenzo, a former heroin addict, lives in Thanur, a commune in Lunigiana, on the slopes of a mysterious mountain. The Quarzerone, with its three peaks. A place of myths and legends, unexplained phenomena, unsolved cases. The latest, that of Jacopo and Margherita, two scouts who vanished in the woods and were never found. Their disappearance is surrounded by a whirlwind of stories and characters. A vast, choral, psychedelic novel. More than twenty years after their tumultuous debut, Wu Ming returns with a new masterpiece.