Giuseppe Terragni was an inimitable artist capable of transfiguring the language developed by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe into an abstraction that looks out onto the threshold of transcendence.

Called up for military service in 1939, in the spring of 1941 he left first for Yugoslavia and then for the Russian Campaign. The war did not affect his research: he sought in the vastness of the steppe new expressive possibilities, a new spiritual sense for his abstractionism. He returns from the front in precarious mental conditions and undermined by guilt, but also “spiritualized”. And just a few days before his death, he draws as an epitaph addressed to the future his latest project: a plan for a Cathedral. An amazing project for its mystical influence that heralded a period of architecture that was never to occur because of the disappearance of one of its most talented exponents.

The events described in this book resemble those of a Greek tragedy, in the battle between an individual and destiny, a conflict in which inevitably, the individual must succumb. But the hero crushed by a destiny moved by blind forces, is granted a consolatory way out: the transfiguration of what Nietzsche called the “great pain” in form, in a work of art.