The year is 1 a.c (after Covid), and the city streets are wandered by masked characters. They are the warys, the fearfuls, the dog owners.

A woman in small heels, runs on the sidewalk holding a scarf over her mouth. With the other hand, she clenches her kid, also with a mask on his mouth. The boy stumbles, trying to follow in his mother’s footsteps.

A fearful tick-tock echoes their steps on the pavements. A tall, wide man with an enormous dog crosses S. Luigi’s square, between Vigentino e Corvetto, south of the city. Without a care in the world, he keeps his mask down barely covering his three-days-old beard, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from his mouth.

The memories of the songs happily shouted from the balcony are fading away while only the slanders keep going on behind closed curtains. “Nda l’è ch’el va quel lì col can? El gha mia una casa? Al sa no che ghè la pandemia? Canaglia!”

On the renovated square, the church watches over. The bell chimes to mark time. Dong, dong, rings the bell.

With hays and time, peaches and rascals become divine.

The year is 2 a.C. and the city is starting to blossom again. The good hard-working people are back on the streets and so are the rascals, le canaglie, mixed with them, almost invisible. A new parlor has opened, a modern-time tavern where you can eat drink and have a laugh.

The wine flows from the bottles and cocktails mixed by skillful hands drip from the blender. Tasty morsels, exquisite little things, vanish in the open mouths in a blink of an eye. Not a day goes by without a song, a joke, or a chat between good hard-working people.

But what about those rascals, those canaglie? They sit at the tables and mingle with the crowd. What unspeakable actions do they hide in their past? Nobody knows. Except someone, at the tables, after a certain number of glasses.

Because is a truth universally acknowledged that a secret consists in repeating it only to one person at a time.