Gianfranco Pannone

The characters include a dirty-dealing 80-year-old mayor with a troubling Fascist past and a bloodthirsty middle-aged writer - also an ex-Fascist, who has now turned Marxist-Leninist and is ready to settle his accounts with history. There is a young leftist idealist, a city councilperson who is fighting real estate speculation. This is the portrait of Latina and its inhabitants. This province is certainly an anomaly, but is not so far from the present-day times that all of Italy is going through now.

Three stories to narrate the relationship between mount Vesuvius and the humanity living at its feet. Maria and her flower garden, Matteo, an artist who paints using the volcano's ashes, and Yole, a neo-melodic singer whose devotion to the Virgin Mary is almost idolatric.

Are Italians good people? debatable. But ours are, without any doubt, not warlike people, also because the millenary history of the country has seen too many wars, violence and pestilences. starting from this particular historical condition, Scherza con i fanti wants to be a universal hymn to peace, but above all it presents itself as a journey that passes through recent Italian history, exploring the difficult and even ironic relationship of the population with the military world and, in general, with power through four war diaries.