When they say goodbye, they exchange phone numbers and addresses. They start writing to each other, learning about one another. Piero cannot forget that girl from Alto Adige, though he only saw her for a few minutes. Mina too has not forgotten Piero, so she returns to Rome, this time for him. She will never leave, because Piero immediately suggests that they live together in the house he shares with his parents. Things go smoothly, as is the case when something new is being born.

After two years of living together, Piero’s mother takes the opportunity at supper to ask: ‘Why don’t you two get married?’ Piero is silent; Mina keeps her eyes lowered and Piero changes the subject. The evening comes to an end. When they are alone, however, Mina asks him: ‘Why didn’t you answer? Don’t you want to marry me?’ Piero replies: ‘I don’t want to marry you. Because you must be free, free to leave whenever you want. When my illness turns me into a lifeless stump, I will only be a burden to you.’

Piero has already explained that he suffers from progressive muscular dystrophy, a neuro-degenerative disease that affects the muscles and progressively destroys the body. But it is only then that he confides his fears to her: ‘I can’t hide anything from you, I will die asphyxiated.’ Mina replies with disarming simplicity, a simplicity as deep as the sea: ‘In the meantime we can carry on. After all, no one knows what the future holds. Those who are afraid of the future don’t live in the present.’ And so, with her simplicity, she completely defuses the dramatic charge of Piero’s words, spoken to avoid jeopardizing Mina’s happiness.

In 1980 they get married in church, since the Welby family is Catholic. Piero arrives at the wedding in a wheelchair; the disease is slowly affecting everything: arms, hands, legs, even the heart. He used to love walking in the woods because his father was a hunter, but he can’t do it anymore. Mina does not lose heart and with her usual simplicity tells him: ‘If you can’t go hunting anymore, we’ll go fishing!’ That’s how Mina is: for her, the fact that you can no longer do something is merely a reason to do other things that may be even more enjoyable and entertaining. And so they go fishing, Piero in the wheelchair, with the fishing rods in a pole holder mounted on the chair. And, since Piero has difficulty moving his arms, Mina also learns how to bait the hook: ‘I never in my life imagined that I would end up putting worms on a hook.’