The documentary begins at the end: the weekend of 26/27 August 1950, the last, hectic days of Pavese's life.
He wanders around the deserted city, looking for friends he cannot find, writing, telephoning people.
On the Sunday evening, in a hotel near the station in Turin, he takes his own life.
This epilogue provides the premise to recount another story.
The story of a man, a writer and an intellectual who in his short life managed to invent, and above all create, a new literary and cultural world that would mark the second half of the 20th century in Italy and give it an identity.
In order to better highlight all the aspects of his exceptional talent, the documentary is divided into various chapters: as many as the crafts he worked in.
Pavese is the poet in his early 20s who discovers narrative poetry; Pavese is the young writer who tries his hand at a novella by analysing and closely examining adolescence, especially female adolescence; Pavese is the tireless discoverer of words, of American slang, of low, everyday language, thanks to which he translates and brings unknown American literature to the provincial Italy of the 1930s: from Faulkner to Dos Passos, from Gertrude Stein to Steinbeck; Pavese, along with Giulio Einaudi and a group of extraordinary young men who – like him – had studied at the D'Azeglio High School, helped give birth to the Einaudi publishing house in 1933.
All this, brought to life through a selection of archive material, numerous interviews and, above all, visual and musical atmospheres recreated in traditionally “Pavesian” locations that provide a fantastical backdrop to his texts, letters, poems and diaries.
A time and a landscape, therefore, to evoke his era but which, if we retrace it today with the eyes of “our time”, restore to us a Pavese who is much more current and contemporary than the man we thought we knew.