When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.
In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.
My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.
In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.
