What happened to the working class in Italy? Why is the left no longer the "normal" point of reference for it, and why is its political horizon increasingly darkening?

Alessandro Portelli explores this striking "anthropological mutation" by delving into the field of an emblematic reality, gathering dozens of stories and testimonies from a traditionally red city, home to one of Italy's most important industries, with a rich history of strikes and labor struggles, which decides to distance itself from its history and cross to the "other side," first falling into the hands of a far-right municipal government and, five years later, to a local tycoon who aspires to become a new Berlusconi.

The city is Terni, a place where Portelli has conducted oral history research for decades, interviewing hundreds of people and studying the depths of their souls. In the pages of the book, he attempts to trace the journey of the last ten years, which has led the city "from red to black."

Terni was the first significant city outside Northern Italy to bring a League City Council to power; it was also the first city that unexpectedly led to the defeat of a right-wing coalition led by Brothers of Italy, which seemed poised to win the elections comfortably: in this sense, it forms a kind of laboratory where national history unfolds in more extreme and dramatic forms.

Processes of deindustrialization, a crisis of the left, cultural and identity disorientation, environmental and health crises, as well as the weakness of a disjointed right, combative, culturally unadapted, localist yet simultaneously propelled to power by fears and insecurities (crime, drugs, immigration, historical revisionism): the story of this aging city that has lost its essence ("Terni is a city that declared war on its own history," states one of the narrators) and struggles to envision its future, which risks increasingly becoming the story of the entire country.