Tommaso is a Literature teacher with a passion for the incipit of novels because they take him on roads in lives that are not his. After a violent discussion with his partner Irene, he decides to take advantage of her absence for a business trip and a bridge to school to go to Bussana Vecchia for a few days, the village near Sanremo destroyed by a violent earthquake in 1887 and repopulated at the end of the Fifties from a community of artists. He wants to find out who is the painter of those mysterious faces of a woman who so much resemble his mother and whom he found by chance in a stall on the Via Marina. The only thing he knwos is the nickname of the painter: "Gabbiano", Seagle.

Here, among the ruins of a village that is trying to be reborn thanks to the love of art, it will find the courage to look at its own, and with the help of truly extraordinary characters, it will understand that the real beauty is to go on its own ruins. And rebuild.