The Congrega dei Cartari in the Italian port of Amalfi produces the finest paper in Europe, but it is also famous for the meticulous selection process of its buyers. Everything depends on what is going to be written on it. The Queen of Naples, Giovanna II, wants to write an irresistible love letter to Pandolfello Piscopo, the most beloved of her lovers. Accompanied by a hundred soldiers, a retinue of servants, and a dozen writers—the most important in her kingdom, charged with expressing her feelings—on the hottest day of September in a year near the beginning of the 15th century, she sets out on an expedition to the city to obtain the paper by any means necessary.

Between hills that appear from one moment to the next, trouser legs and sleeves that ascend to the sky, sweaty nightgowns clinging to the body, bramble stems that bleed the skin, saints that flee from their niches, angels that fly from the walls, doves that come off the stained glass windows, labyrinthine palaces of silk, blind tasters of paper, banks of trash swimming between cisterns and mills, and many other things difficult to imagine, the reader will enter into a memorable story, full of humor, which has writing itself as its center. A slow, sublime, profound writing, far from that carried out by the vain, drunk, servile and annoying writers of the entourage. Whose process is comparable to that of the production of the famous paper or the repeated movement of a piece of glass between the fingers of a stained glass artist, while he tries to place his last piece.

Watermarked Paper is the first story, the first branch of Goran Petrovic's Delta Novel, a universe of allegorical narratives that develops from the Middle Ages to the present day.