You won't even find a date in this book that tells us why you can't not love history. Starting from the youthful passion for pirates and rebels and for characters like Robin Hood, William Wallace, Don Quixote and Lawrence of Arabia, the author - a 36-year-old historian, in his seventh book - accompanies us in discovering our past by retracing also its gradual awareness of "what is" history. From the revolt of Spartacus to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, from the Stories of Herodotus to the Spanish Civil War, from the life of Jesus to the terrorist attack of the Twin Towers, Greppi proposes a journey with a global outlook that questions good and evil, on the sense of belonging, on the border between narration and historical reconstruction, on the intertwining of choices and chance and on the need to take a position, in the past as in the present. Alongside Greppi's voice, in these pages dedicated to the general public, we find those of his "imperfect heroes", from George Orwell to Simone Weil, from Jorge Semprún to Primo Levi, to Marc Bloch, the French historian of the Middle Ages who chose to continue his intellectual commitment in the Resistance, sacrificing himself for our freedom. Because the history, the authentic one, leads to action.

A book that proposes a vision of ethical, universal, self-critical, reactive and partisan history - a story that can serve as our guide, to look to the future.