Gianfranco Mazzilli

Gianfranco Mazzilli is a sixteen-year-old Milanese boy who attends Enver Hoxha High School. Although he struggles to be an average student, his real passion is playing games at The Gladiator, a store in Milan's Galleria degli Popoli. His favorite game is "Rails across Europe," which allows him to pretend he is a railroad magnate in the nineteenth century.

Gianfranco's father is Cristoforo Mazzilli, an apparatchik in the Milanese bureaucracy. They live on the same floor and share a kitchen and bathroom with the Crosetti family, whose daughter, Annarita is a year ahead of Gianfranco at school.