The photo of a smiling boy in a striped t-shirt. In the beginning it is just a family moment, preserved and framed in a living room in a house in Rome. That same picture ends up on the cover of a newspaper, and then on the cover of every newspaper. It fills the screen behind presenters on the national news.

The boy in the photo is Alfredo Rampi. However, this documentary does not want to give an account of what happened to Alfredo; instead it tells the story   of those who told his story. This is the tale of the media that made and distorted the story of Alfredo Rampi (and in doing so were radically altered themselves), severing it from fact and real people and transforming it into a watershed moment in the collective Italian consciousness.