No ordinary travel book, this personal view of the lingering continuity of traditional life in the countryside, provinces and ancient towns of Italy takes the reader on a journey into the past, one steadily disappearing throughout the lands of the Mediterranean. In a series of close-ups and panoramic scenes, there are meetings with the farmers Livia and Gino, the local choir, Parise the share cropper, the workers at the olive press, citizens and mourners in Crotone, the ghost inhabitants of Matera, and actors and transvestites in Naples. The books ends with the Ruins Management, Pompeii seen as a symbol of this other Italy, challenged by all kinds of natural, ecological and man-made disaster, and yet somehow still surviving.