When there's nothing but the bike. A bike to go to work, a bike to go to study, a bike to go home, or simply a bike to seek all of this - work, study, home. A bike to start living, and in their case, to start living again.

Migrants. Indians in the Pontine countryside. Eighty years ago, the emigrants in the Pontine countryside were Italians. The Italians, then, were reclaiming the land, the Indians, today, are cultivating it. Fields and countryside to survive. Breaking their backs. But this is life, the land is low, at any latitude.

It was 2013 when Filippo Trojano, from Rome, took the first photograph - four Indians, under the March rain, on bicycles - the first of two hundred portraits dedicated to these migrants from Punjab, particularly those living in a kind of ghetto on the coastal road. The photographs became first an exhibition, then, carefully selected, a book.

Silk fuchsia cover. Title: "Mandeep and Other Stories". Sixty-four pages, forty photographs, a map, texts by Augusto Pieroni and Trojano himself, curated by Marco Delogu, published by Punctum in Rome. Four hundred copies, one given by Trojano to me, destined for the Lucos Cozza Bicycle Library.

The men (and there are also some women and children) need no text nor captions. Proud, dignified, peaceful, strong, marked but not defeated by misfortunes and sacrifices, they silently tell their stories of travels, hardships, hopes. The bicycles are anything but racing bikes: men's, women's, leisure, not very competitive mountain bikes, all smelling of recycling, savings, repairs, and community life, especially that children's bicycle, or rather, bicycles - three, simultaneously.

But a bike is not just for going and coming, going and returning, going and searching, hoping to find. A bike is for dreaming. The Indians, dreaming of a new life, and who knows, after years, might have finally achieved it with the dignity they deserve. And Trojano himself, with the restlessness of someone seeking truth in words or images, wants to tell life's story.