Sciamadda

Summary:

Genoa, early 20th century. Clelia is ready to embark for America with her parents, but she doesn’t know that her family has other plans for her: she will have to stay with her aunt Elena, a wealthy and austere woman with a past that no one talks about. Clelia desperately tries to escape the decision and stop her parents, and in her anger she rips a necklace of large black pearls from the neck of her hated aunt. She clutches one of the pearls between her fingers as she rushes down the alleys towards the port. There, she encounters an elderly fortune teller who, in exchange for a pearl, offers her a prophecy: “Only when the girl puts back together what has been destroyed will everything come back into place.” Thus a new adventure begins for Clelia, as she secretly searches for the missing pieces of the necklace she wants to repair at all costs. A journey full of moments of growth, pain, hope, and reconciliation, which will bring her into contact with spiritualism and introduce her to Sebastiano, a boy from the port. He will be the first to notice the strength with which Clelia faces every difficulty, a strength which shines in her like a “sciamadda”, which in the Ligurian language means “flame.”