Teresa Antonacci & Connie Guzzo McParland 
The Twelfth Room 

Alina has red hair, green eyes and an extraordinary intelligence: at the age of two, she can already read and count. She loves to surgically dissect the world around her and listen to the stories that her grandfather Giuseppe tells her, as they wander through the alleys and rocky coastline of Polignano. Hers is an atypical childhood, always poised between genius and discomfort, skipped life stages and looming bullying. Because she is always the youngest one, the best one, the strongest and most fragile one at the same time. A fish out of water with intellectual and sensory ‘superpowers’, with depression and anorexia always lurking. Until Nicola arrives to break her crystal ball. A love that is as strong as it is socially unacceptable and that will mark the beginning of her real life, of her forced growth, of her precocious blossoming into a strong woman, capable of loving and suffering. This is the story of Alina and of her way of being, living with Asperger”s syndrome, in a crescendo of emotions ‘differently’ felt between Polignano, Milan and Paris, to then return to the starting point: the twelfth room.