For Amedeo, a boy from the sun-scorched hills of Southern Italy, the sea is an escape. Trading the smell of poverty for the clean, cold scent of steel, he joins the Regia Marina and is assigned to the magnificent battleship Corazzata Littorio, the pride of Mussolini's fleet.
But the grand adventure of naval glory quickly dissolves into the brutal reality of war: the thunderous shock of Mediterranean battles, the devastating humiliation of the night raid on Taranto, and the bewildering betrayal of the armistice that turns allies into deadly foes.
Cast adrift by history, Amedeo and the rest of the crew find themselves in a surreal floating prison on the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt. Here, in a civilised internment, the war against the enemy is replaced by a more insidious battle - against heat, rust, and the slow corrosion of the human soul.
