Les Caves du Vatican

Set against the bustling backdrop of Rome in 1890, the story follows Anthime Armand‑Dubois, a freemason and a scientist obsessed with the mysteries of living tissue, and his devout wife Véronique, who clings to prayer and routine. Their marriage is a careful choreography of mutual tolerance: she tends the household and her daily devotions, while he retreats to a makeshift laboratory hidden behind an orange‑tree‑lined terrace.

The cramped apartment in the Forgetti palace becomes a stage for their quiet tensions. Anthime’s experiments on rats and other creatures spill into the very walls they share, while Véronique cultivates resilient aspidistras on the balcony, hoping they’ll flourish where Parisian gardens fail. Their world further shifts when a rag‑clad street boy named Beppo, a self‑styled prosecutor, appears at their door, offering both a glimpse of Rome’s underbelly and a potential assistant for Anthime’s curious inquiries.

Listeners are drawn into a delicate dance of faith versus reason, intimacy versus isolation, and the subtle humor that arises when science collides with everyday life in the heart of the Vatican’s shadows.