The need for this documentary came about one Saturday night in Catania. A river of bodies, a throng of ravenous and pushy souls trying to reach the piazza of Teatro Massimo, which has long been the place where all the kids hang out. In the 1990s I lived the boom years of the Catania scene to the full. Staying out, café concerts and pubs opening on every corner of the city centre were tangible signs of a city flourishing again after the previous dark decades. Maybe my memory’s distorted, but my perception is that we were different from the kids crowding the same streets today. A desire to understand that difference, without judging, led me to undertake this journey down the memory lane of those years, meeting the protagonists, musicians, actors and artists who made that era so great; Carmen Consoli debuting in pubs; Emma Scialfa, ballerina, thinking of leaving Sicily; Carmelo Bongiorno, photographer, who still can’t decide whether he was right to stay; Ida Carrara, a lifetime spent at the side of the great Turi Ferro. In their own words each of them talks about their visceral, contradictory ties to the city, a love-hate relationship, a perpetual coming and going. Catania is told through their eyes: the splendour of the past and the city of today emptied of any meaning, as though it were the mirror of an Italy that has lost its own identity based on art and culture.