The Serpent's Nights

A story that silence makes visible

In the winter of 2020, Bergamo fell silent. At its airport, the people no one noticed became impossible to ignore.

As the city shuts its doors and counts its dead, a small group of people with nowhere else to go keeps living inside Orio al Serio Airport: on cold benches, beneath canceled flights, through nights that seem to have no end.

There is Andrea, ordinary enough to be invisible; Yolanda, the queen of the airport, who gathers discarded fruit so that nothing goes to waste; Samuel, who counts his breaths to keep himself steady; Paolo, who plays an abandoned white piano after dark; and Ripa, who always carries one bag more than everyone else.

What holds them together is not heroism, but small gestures: a shared blanket, a cigarette lit for someone else, an apple passed from hand to hand. Day after day, a basket fills with bruised fruit, and with everything the world believes it can throw away: dignity, stubbornness, memory and care.

Inspired by Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit and by the author’s long experience of listening to people on the margins of the city, The Serpent’s Nights is a story of survival without spectacle. The book includes ten charcoal illustrations and a musical thread woven through Bach, Satie and Barber.

Even bruised fruit still carries a seed.