Gardien de la citadelle Europe, le commandant Salvatore Piracci navigue depuis vingt ans au large des côtes italiennes, afin d'intercepter les embarcations des émigrés clandestins. Plusieurs événements viennent ébranler sa foi en sa mission et donner un nouveau sens à son existence. Dans le même temps, au Soudan, deux frères s'apprêtent à entreprendre le long et dangereux voyage qui doit les conduire vers le continent de leurs rêves, l'Eldorado européen.
When it was first published in the author's native country, THE PALACE OF DREAMS was immediately banned. The novel revolves around a secret ministry whose task is not just to spy on its citizens, but to collect and interpret their dreams. An entire nation's unconscious is thus tapped and meticulously laid bare in the form of images and symbols of the dreaming mind.
The bards who stopped at the inn near the riverbank were forever being asked to sing the ballad of the three young masons, all brothers, who were fated never to complete the building of their wall until they had immured one of their wives in it. In the year 1377, when the roadbuilders threatened to put the ferrymen out of business by building a stone bridge to carry the traffic between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, the legend was to become a grisly reality. What the builders completed of the bridge by day was destroyed by night. Sabotage, said some. The vengeful spirits of the waters, said others. But once a man was taken to be immured, once he was plastered into a cavity of the first pier, the attacks on the bridge stopped, the two banks of the river had a permanent link. The first troops to cross the bridge were to be the vanguard of the Ottoman Turks advancing irresistably into Europe. Many have described the retreat of Christendom after the fall of Constantinople, as Islam forced a passage westwards through the Balkans towards the European heartlands. Seldom, though, has the story been told so starkly, so hauntingly, as in this succinct fable of conflict, terror, dissention and superstition by Albania's most influential novelist.