Everything begins with a sentence read in a diary during the third year of high school: “Leave the world better than you found it.” It strikes Mattia straight in the heart, perhaps because his world, at that moment, is not a very good place. The problem is that the sentence comes without instructions, and it’s up to him to figure out how to put it into practice. Or rather, the way finds him.

A clown therapy course, started almost by chance, reveals a path: making people smile when they have no reason to. That’s how Flip is born — the juggler and magician who goes where Mattia would never dare to go, who isn’t afraid, or at least knows how to hide his fear very well behind the smallest mask in the world: his red nose.

First in hospitals, then in orphanages in Belarus, Flip learns that limits exist only if we build them ourselves. He learns this from a boy who flies kites without hands. But the most powerful lessons arrive in war zones: in refugee camps in Lebanon and Turkey, among desperate families who have lost everything, the daily challenge is to make children play , children who have forgotten how to be children. And yet, when they remember, their smiles light up the world and, for a moment, truly make it a better place.

In this book, as beautiful as a fairy tale, Mattia tells the story of Flip’s journey. Supported by friends as fearless and unconventional as he is, he faces hunger and conflict, loneliness and abandonment, convinced he has something to give, only to discover that every mission gives him far more than he could ever offer.