La virgen negra

The curator Teresa Battaglia doubts whether to continue hiding from her team the disease that is affecting her memory, when she receives a call from an art gallery: a portrait of enormous value has been found attributed to a cult painter, Alessio Andrian, whose eleventh and last work was believed lost. The painting, however, has a detail that overshadows the discovery: the red paint that draws the face of a young woman is actually human blood and, according to the chromatic analysis, the artist's brush was soaked in a heart that was still beating. Teresa and her team have to find out what happened in 1945, the year the painting was painted, when the author was hiding in the woods near the border between Italy and Yugoslavia fleeing from the Nazis. Battaglia, whose health is increasingly fragile, must rely on the help of her collaborator Massimo Marini, but soon he will realize that she is not the only one who hides an unspeakable secret.