At its heart is the figure of Giacomo Petrotta, a politically trained Marxist who, together with other young villagers, organized the distribution of food to the starving population in a context dominated by feudal landowners, ex-Fascists, mafia interests, and the uncertainty left by the American occupation. Their efforts to collect and redistribute grain were acts of solidarity as much as open challenges to the established order. Petrotta’s own recollections provide detailed insight into these distributions, the opportunism of local power brokers, the complicity of law enforcement with landlords, and the final theft that robbed the community of its scarce resources.

The book also situates these events within broader reflections on land rights, decolonization, and contemporary peasant movements, drawing connections between Sicily’s postwar insurrections and today’s struggles for agrarian reform. Conversations with activists—such as Douglas Estevam of Brazil’s Movimento Sem Terra and excerpts from psychoanalytical and historical analyses reveal how collective memory becomes a force of political mobilization.