Un pinguino a Trieste

During the 1950s Trieste had a penguin as mascot: its name was Marco and came all the way from South Africa. Chiara Carminati fictionalizes its arrive, intertwining it with the story of Nicolò, a boy looking for his father, missing in the war.

Nicolò is a boy in the 1950s when he leaves Istria and his grandfather to go to Trieste and live with his uncle. There he will be able to attend an Italian school, find a job and try to gather some news about his father, a missing sailor, who never came back from Africa after the war. When he discovers his father might be alive he finds a job on a cruise ship in order to get to South Africa and look for him.