Mauro lives suspended between different worlds: Naples, where he shares a basement home in the district of Pianura with his large family and struggles each day to carve out a space of his own; and São Vicente, the island he was forced to leave as a child and remembers with tenderness: the land endlessly swept by the wind, midday runs through the streets, the Carnival of feathers and black bodies where everyone can choose who they want to become. He dreams of returning to mend the fracture between the many pieces that make him who he is — “1/4 Cape Verde and 3/4 Italy,” even without citizenship. Yet the renewal of his residence permit stretches into an endless wait.
Until, at last, the journey home begins. Among stray dogs and cattle longing to be free, sea-wrecks and land-wrecks, and a deep, persistent nostalgia, the return reveals an island-that-no-longer-exists — leading Mauro toward a new metamorphosis.