oh wow guys, you are amazing! : ) Thanks so much!
As for the various points discussed above:
More on how I shot and processed this image
As someone mentioned above, my tiny little camera at least allows me to shoot in raw, so perhaps starting from there instead of the compressed image could help keeping a little more detail. That's what I thought, at least, so I tried to export to jpeg straight from the raw without touching any tone curve or level clipping. I only applied the same (soft) noise reduction with the exact same settings as before. You can see the old photo
here and the new one
here. It is quite clear that in the first post-production process I deliberately clipped even more part of the shadows because of a personal preference. I wanted a picture with lots of "true black", and little light defining the scene only. I know you might disagree on a personal taste level, but that's the look I was researching, and I have to say that I was quite happy with how the picture was looking on my screen. That said, the problem clearly arose at a second stage, that is when I realised that the printed version of the image was actually collapsing most of the remaining shadows to pure black too, hence my disappointment. How do you normally prevent this? Do you usually use different processing settings for the copies that will be printed and those who will live on screens? Also, I can select both sRGB and Adobe as colour profile. Does it make any difference at all for black and white pictures?