Redenta Restelli is the true soul of the Fabbricone: Marianna Tomaselli imagined that all the sheets hanging out to dry would flutter for her as she strides confidently across the courtyard. Redenta Restelli, just over thirty years old and with a great love behind her, crushed by the violence of war (her Andrea had died on the Albanian front), lives with her brother. In the distance, she sees the flames rising from the chimneys of the Purfina plant. The light of those flames blends with the flashes of the storm that is breaking out, shaking the air and slamming the shutters: this is the soundtrack of the Fabbricone.

Redenta has a privileged vantage point: the windowsill from which she keeps track of every movement. “As always, Redenta stood motionless at the window, her eyes strained downward to spy,” notes Sandrino Schieppati somewhat irritably—the young man, the first of seven children, who fled the Fabbricone out of restlessness in search of an ambiguous fortune.

In the video filmed on a historic Ferrovie Nord railway carriage in motion, Sandrino is played by Giacomo Toccaceli: we hear the confession of his failed attempt to return home. On the same carriage is also his mother, Mrs. Schieppati, played by Giulia Heathfield Di Renzi: she recounts her futile search for her son in the “snake pit,” an underworld of prostitution on the edges of the park.