The book gathers the pictures born of the project to bring out one part of the body in particular: the hands. Begun twenty years ago, the RITRATTI project has won many prizes and been shown in solo exhibitions in Italy and abroad, most recently at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere. The hands with which we carry out almost all our daily gestures are almost never part of a portrait. "Drawn first of all by people’s gaze, I asked those I had chosen to show me their hands," the author explains. Page after page we meet the hands of many people, different in ethnicity, profession and social class: Maria del Mar, accountant; Vincenzo, fishmonger; Sonia, actress; Enzo, playwright; Soraya, physiotherapist, whose face is completely covered. Asked to show them, the sitters struggle to know what pose to take, and each reaches an entirely personal solution. The images, surrounded by a blue neon frame as if to create a tabernacle, bring out human diversity: each pair of hands, even when shown apart from the face, tells a story, a personality, a truth. "The redemption of the hands, their exaltation, in fact hides them, and brings the person to the fore. The whole person. Only the hands, pars pro toto: and there is the whole. The whole soul" (Tomaso Montanari).