At the age of nineteen, Gabriele decides to leave his small village in the wilds of the central Italian Apennines for a new life in France. His departure is sudden, and he leaves without saying goodbye to anyone: he is escaping from the boredom of a middle-class upbringing and a family unable to understand him. In Paris he finds first a room and then a job as a shop assistant in a celebrated jewellers on the Avenue Montaigne. Although he doesn't yet realise it, this is the real beginning of his journey. A painful, but necessary, voyage of discovery towards the terrible acceptance of a desire so far from the accepted norms to which he had previously rigorously adhered: the desire for a perfect body. .....