Il secondo piano

Ritanna Armeni, with her usual rigorous and profound enthusiasm, traverses a crucial passage in our History and gives substance to an exemplary story about courage and sisterhood, strength and creativity, joy, fear, and resistance.

In a suburban Franciscan convent, amidst the scents of the garden and a new neighborhood under construction, Sister Ignazia and her sisters find themselves in the surreal situation of housing a German infirmary on the ground floor and, on the second floor, some families who miraculously escaped the Ghetto roundup. Separating them, only a staircase and the mild audacity of those who do not hesitate to put themselves on the line to the end. Rome, in the last year of the war, is not “open city.” The Germans, on the verge of defeat, grip it in an increasingly ruthless grip, the Allies struggle to arrive, the Romans fight paying with blood for every act of rebellion. In a city destroyed by starvation, bombs, and terror, Jews are persecuted, deported, killed, as the most dangerous and truest of enemies. And the Church? While the Nazi surrender is being negotiated in secret in the Vatican and the pontiff chooses, more or less openly, the path of caution, holy places open to welcome – defying the rules and even some commandments – those in need.