Thirteen tales make up the "Adriatic Stories"; thirteen events that scale from XIV to XX century and that have the common setting of the Adriatic and the lands that face it. Dalmatian, Jews, Slavs, Italians, Austrian, Hungarians; clergymen and artisans; traders and slaves, gentlemen and "poareti" (poor men) that destiny blows from one side of the sea to the other, in a secular coming and going that brings the two banks closer and joins them into a single cultural and human space. Cruel or miserable events, from the poor arblast maker that dies by torture in Ragusa, to the Slavic clergyman killed by the phthisis in a cupboard under the stairs in Fermo, to the beautiful slave girl from across the sea who ends up in the arms of a kind old man in Ancona and then disappears (to who knows where). All these are stories that tell what often the most accredited historiography fails to express: the sense of life and of the destiny of the individual.

Sergio Anselmi once taught Economic History at the University of Ancona.