Mariano Scrofani, a painter, seventy years old, has always known that paintings don't rise from the dead. Then, at an auction in Milan, a canvas of his that had been missing for decades reappears, perfect down to the last grain of sand. A forgery is impossible, because matter cannot be copied. But that painting hides, beneath the paint, the secret signature he has never revealed to anyone. To anyone but one person. One X-ray is enough to open the case.
In those same days, a single painting vanishes from a villa in the hills, The Blood of Fenestrelle, and an old history book annotated in pencil is left behind in the grass: "And the names?" So begins a chase across half of Europe and a hundred and sixty years: a thief who mends things instead of breaking them, a fortress in the Alps where in 1861 the boys of the South were taken, and a name sewn inside a canvas by two hands that had loved each other.
It will be Sicily that gives everything back: a surname kept silent for thirty-five years, a torn-out page from a register, and an exhibition where hundreds of people step up to a white wall to write the names of their dead.
A thriller about the authenticity of paintings, of names and of affections. A novel about memory, about the courage to sign, and about the right of every name not to be erased twice: by death and by silence.
"Matter doesn't lie. At most, it waits for someone to hold it up to the light."
The first novel by Mario Raniolo, painter and author of «The Colour of Matter».
164 pages · 17.8 × 25.4 cm · paperback
Published by MArt Srl, 2026
