"Arrested at 10.30 pm on November 8, 1926, in front of the entrance to via Morgagni 25, home of the Passarge family, the Honorable Gramsci was taken to the Regina Coeli prison. In that few minutes the end was decreed, or almost , the political activity of a passionate and courageous militant, even if the way was opened for the work of a giant of thought, political, but not only. "

Angelo d'Orsi tells this story from his childhood in Sardinia to his studies in Turin, from Moscow to Vienna, from Rome to the Turi prison, to the Roman clinic where he died on April 27, 1937. Public figures and figures from private life, starting with from the Schucht family and the complex love affair with Giulia, they cross the life and the intellectual and political story of the greatest Italian thinker (and revolutionary) of the twentieth century.

With a narrative capable of reproducing the dramatic historical events of which Gramsci was the protagonist or witness, making himself their interpreter in real time, d'Orsi sheds light on the genealogy and originality of his thought, covering the convergences, collisions and interference with the history of the Italian and Soviet left, and its protagonists, from Togliatti to Bordiga, from Lenin to Trotsky and Stalin.

Of the "leader of the working class", as Togliatti defined him in 1927, d'Orsi shows the growing effort to overcome the rigid barriers of the "fence of Marxism-Leninism", under the banner of critical and anti-dogmatic thinking, without ever losing given the goal that will accompany him until the last day: the liberation of the proletariat from its chains. And he does so by listening to the words he left, together with the testimonies of those close to him, first of all his sister-in-law Tania Schucht, and her comrades and political opponents, with a compelling biographical, historical and political reconstruction that takes stock of the current state of studies, but which is also the poignant story of a tormented and profound personality, endowed with a genius so penetrating as to be out of date in his time and, perhaps, also in ours.