The work evokes the period in Italy of kidnapping of young heirs to leading business families by organised criminal groups – with extensive media focus on the story of Paul Getty III – which, beginning with the kidnapping of Pietro Torielli Jr, was particularly intense in the Lombardy region. It was characterised by a long period of violence, of demands for high ransoms – used to fund the burgeoning drug-traffic trade – of increasingly inhumane prisons and, as Cosa Nostra was gradually replaced by the ‘Ndrangheta, of hostages who often never returned home. 
This was the case of “Cricri”, just turned 18, who was kidnapped the very evening she went out with her boyfriend and a friend to celebrate graduation and her birthday. Held prisoner for 28 days in a hole, malnourished, with only a plastic tube five centimetres in diameter for air, Cristina Mazzotti fell victim to the conditions in which she was held. The kidnappers threw her body into a rubbish dump the day before collecting the huge ransom.