Manlio is eighty-two years old. When he was forty, he left his job as a teacher to go work in a mine. But, to get to know himself and this new world better, he took on the most difficult job: timekeeper. Silvestro is sixty-one and has been working in the mine since he was twenty-three; he is the son of miners and a son of the mine. The paths of these two men, different and yet parallel, cross in 1992, when they barricade themselves for months in the San Giovanni mine in Sardinia, setting explosives in the entrance to protest the closing of the mine and the desertification of the landscape.