It happens that on a summer evening that doesn't want to finish a street in Rome it turns into the pages of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol, albeit out of season.
It happens that dozens of unknown people gather around a car because they are attracted by the desperate meow of a kitten that has entered the engine and is afraid to go out.
Flashlights, baby food, meows downloaded from the internet that reproduce the call of a mother cat, all to allow a little creature of just over a month to go out.
But he doesn't want to know.
Then the rush to call the firefighters, the municipal police, the carabinieri.
They say that the owner of the car must be found, and one of the many passers-by and fortuitous and fortunate cases of that night points to the door.
The only one to answer is the man who has the car keys and who gets out immediately.
The firefighters arrive, open the hood, try to lift the car with the approval of the gentleman who wears shorts and was definitely in pajamas before.
The cat does not come out.
He does it suddenly, when hopes seemed lost.
He crosses the street lightning fast, it's all black, like that strange night, and no one is ready to grab it, so much is the surprise to finally see it.
More and more frightened he manages to slip into the engine of another car.
The firefighters raise their hands, they have to flee for an urgent intervention.
In the warm air he resounds an 'ohhh' of amazement and resignation.
The policemen also arrive and in a minute they go back, through the plate, to the owner of the other car.
She goes down too, she too wants the little guy to be saved.
A tall, thin policewoman with a hand so slender as to go between the gears of the engine grabs the kitten by the scruff, as the mother cat would have done, and pulls him out of that hiding place that if it had lasted could have meant death.
There is an applause of liberation, of joy, someone is crying.
Instead, he no longer meows, his blue eyes are amazed to be at the center of so much interest.
A boy runs to take home milk and a syringe to feed him, "he will be hungry", a couple arrives with the carrier, "we will host him tonight", a woman on the phone who had missed two trains in the morning to save the baby and who followed the rescue operation and offers to adopt it.
Two other tall guys greet each other with a hug almost ashamed, "I would not have been able to sleep knowing that in there alone, luckily".
And as in the Christmas Carol, snow could not be missing, in the form of summer rain, which bathes a Roman night like many others and yet so unique.