Vinci il paradiso
A Venetian street sweeper wins a trip to the Amazon. A graphic novel in progress: a selection of pages (in Italian).
"Win Paradise" · Graphic novel in progress · Illusioni Productions · 80 pages drawn so far
The story
Rosario Fusinato sweeps the streets of Venice and never throws anything away: to him, discarded objects are "things that haven't finished living yet", and his home is packed with everything he picks up. One morning, among the flowers of St Mark's Square, he finds a chocolate bar wrapper: Vinci il paradiso ("Win Paradise"), a contest promising a holiday in an exclusive resort in the Amazon rainforest.
He has never even crossed the bridge to the mainland. He enters anyway. And he wins.
As soon as he lands in Colombia he loses his phone, money and passport, and ends up in a vast landfill: the hell he had always imagined. But among the rubbish he finds a community that builds pedal-powered machines, recovers gold from old phones and recycles everything. He meets Amina, an unpredictable young woman with light fingers, and Juan, a curandero who takes him into the forest, where people really live the way Rosario always described paradise: wasting nothing.
Between snakes, lost antidotes, rapids and a village that takes him for a god because of a lighter and a pocket radio, Rosario discovers that bringing your own world into paradise can ruin it. Meanwhile, back in Venice, his friends from the bar search for him everywhere, even at the Alpini rally.
A comedy in Venetian dialect about waste, recycling and the paradise we all carry inside.
Selected pages
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