A social novel which, in recounting the desacralisation of contemporary life, stages our human comedy with irresistible humour. But also a great love story: the one between Boccia and Renata, the two protagonists, but also the one that each of us can rediscover for ourselves and for our own ghosts, deciding to open up to a new feeling of time and identity .
Renata is a champion, a woman who wears beauty and intelligence. Boccia has always come to terms with their “impossible” love and even takes part in her marriage to another man. But one day Renata rings at the door of her apartment in the center of Bari and reveals that she has received a diagnosis that leaves no hope. According to her unpredictable style, Renata chooses the path of repression by diving into the colorful social life of Bari and it’s up to Boccia – a psychiatrist – to deal with the shadow of the evil that has touched them. Together with a colleague, he begins to think about the possibility of experimenting with Renata with a therapy that is illegal under Italian law but of whose effectiveness he is very convinced: psychedelic therapy using substances such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD.
Piva’s book is a journey into the human psyche, its suffering but also its possibilities of openness, sharing, generation of new universes. In the honorary atmosphere of the ancient Greeks, who undertook the journey to Eleusis to be initiated into the mysteries of Demeter, Persephone and Hades, Andrea Piva’s protagonists bring to us the last slivers of the luminous strength released by those rites of death and rebirth .
