This is a book that starts from music, from the relationship that exists between a memorable song by Bob Dylan and a narrative ballad that, perhaps born in seventeenth-century Italy, has spread throughout the world since its translation into English in the eighteenth century. But beyond the music, it is a book about the meaning of History and the evolution of time.

In "A Hard's Rain A-going to Fall", Dylan recovers the compositional elements of the ballad, which gains in thickness and depth in the almost apocalyptic events of the twentieth century. His song, as in its original version, is a testament; but this is a legacy without recipients and, probably, without a future horizon. A rhythmic statement that warns of the catastrophe, the meaninglessness and the uncertainty of the new times, including the present, overwhelmed and self-absorbed in the pandemic. Perhaps, his only promising illusion, both in Dylan and in Portelli, is found in those absent from official histories, in those marginalized from stories, in the impertinent delegitimized, those who come to disturb our tranquility with their songs, couplets, verses, proverbs and speeches; those who invent traditions that are repeated, converted, out of tune; those that reverberate for centuries with no intention of fainting or letting themselves be swept away by the current of a "heavy rain".