Published in 1974, it narrates the story of a partly Jewish woman, Ida Ramundo, and her two sons Antonio (nicknamed "Ninnarieddu", "Ninnuzzu" or "Nino") and Giuseppe ("Useppe") in Rome, during and immediately after the Second World War.

Ida Ramundo's mother was secretly Jewish, but subject to epilepsy, bouts of violence, and paranoia, eventually drowning herself in a poorly planned escape to Palestine when Mussolini's fascist race laws were announced.

Ida acquired her mother's timidity thereafter, scarcely protesting when a young German soldier asks to come to her apartment, then rapes her in her teenage son's bed while she suffers an epileptic seizure in January 1941.

In early 1943, their apartment is bombed while Ida and Useppe are grocery shopping, killing their beloved dog Blitz, and forcing them to live in a refuge shelter with a huge extended family for the rest of the war.

During one of his infrequent visits, he takes him to his guerrilla camp for the day, where in the course of a few hours, the three-year-old Useppe watches Nino participate in a raid that kills three German soldiers, and rides home on a pack mule that is also carrying a hidden cache of grenades.

There they meet 13-year-old boarding-school runaway Pietro Scimò, who survives off food, trinkets, and movie tickets given to him by "some faggots", and who tells them stories of fearsome pirates that live across the river from his abandoned hut.

Racing home to find him already dead, Ida realizes that all human history and government is just a list of different methods for people to get away with murdering each other, before falling into a catatonic stupor in which she remains until her death nine years later.