1975. Maurizio Valenzi becomes the first communist mayor of Napoli, the biggest city in the South of Italy. Through interviews with the protagonists of the time and unpublished archive material, this is the story of a group of women and men who tried to realize the dream of a politics able to build proximity to people.
A charismatic mayor and a great team of councilors, planted the seeds of a new idea of a city, which at the time still bore the scars of the post war period and a recent cholera outbreak. But, with the terrible Earthquake of 1980 and the economic interests generated by the "reconstruction business" the political and criminal balance were profoundly changed, and the fate of Napoli is marked by new forms of organization of the Camorra which today, as then, continues to influence the life of the city.
That administrative experience, with its human distinctiveness, the civil values and ideals that characterized it, represents a unique historical moment. An experience that can also make us question how and why Italian communism, with strong social and cultural mass ties, could be swept away together with the ghosts of real communism in the 20th century. With the interviews to the councilors of that dream-team and to the daughters and sons of those who are not there anymore, the film proposes, in a prismatic tale, fragments of images that in the mirrors and refractions of today are nostalgically confronted with the past. That past, thanks to an extraordinary public and private repertoire, tells of a community that at that time tried to build a "Normalcy".
Those wounds, which could not be healed, are hidden in the fascinating and evocative extraordinariness for which Napoli has always been known.