Gabriele Santoro lives in a working-class district of Naples and is a professor at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella, where he teaches piano. One morning, while he is shaving, the postman sounds the buzzer to tell him a parcel has arrived. He presses the button to open the door and, before going to pick it up, stops to wash his face. In that brief span of time, a ten-year-old child sneaks into his apartment and hides. “Il maestro”—that is what they call him in the neighborhood—will not discover him until late in the evening. When he does, he recognises the intruder as Ciro, a boy who lives with his parents and siblings in the attic of the same building. Asked to explain the reason for his flight, Ciro does not speak. Nonetheless, the maestro, acting on instinct, decides to let him hide out in his apartment, embarking on a singular, and tenacious, defiance of Ciro’s enemies.