It was the discovery, in 1948, of a natural gas field in Ripalta, in the Province of Cremona (Lombardy), that catapulted Enrico Mattei into his management career. He had a leading role in post war Italy – but who was Mattei really? The film follows his life from 1945 through until the attack in which he was killed in 1962, cross-referencing it with the political and economical events that characterized what was happening in Italy and the rest of the world during those years. The vicissitudes of the life of a man who indisputably played a leading role in the history of Italy, enable us to relive those exciting years of Italy’s past in the period that followed the end of the second World War. It was a time of modernization and industrialization that opened the way for the famous “boom” of the 1960s and the courageous challenge made by Eni (Italian public oil and gas company), against the all-powerful group of oil companies notoriously known as the “seven sisters”. Mattei’s dramatic death – the victim of a conspiracy that has still not been fully clarified – would appear to be the result of a myriad of situations around the world that together, somehow determined his fate.