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Elsa Morante’s 1974 highly acclaimed but controversial novel, La Storia focusing on the years of the Second World War and the immediate post-war period, reveals the horrorist negation of human dignity effected by the violence of history, power, war and everyday life. This article focuses on Francesca Archibugi’s 2023 television adaptation of Morante’s work and on a visual and spatial rendering of the novel that highlights the tensions between the notion of ‘horrorism’ coined by Adriana Cavarero and transdisciplinary feminist concepts of care. This tension becomes a useful lens by which to view the past and re-think the present through the experiences of vulnerable victims and their responses to dehumanizing forms of violence enabled by the absence of care. It provides a pathway for re-imagining how a politics of care might reverse forms of domination and encourage the undoing and then remaking of a world already violated.