For Mina especially, but also for Piero, all of the hurdles that arise, and there are many, always seem to be opportunities to come up with an alternative way of living. As if every obstacle were a necessary step to put their feelings to the test and above all to build something solid, not something that is merely a way of coping with a tragedy. To create a life for themselves. Because of the respirator, Piero can no longer leave the house. So Mina tries to bring the nature that he loved so much home to him. They devise a way of photographing insects, flowers, flies … They never photograph dead insects, only those that are still alive! Mina helps Piero understand that the present is the only true form of eternity that man can know. Piero will tell her: ‘You made me do so many things that I didn’t even realize I was ill.’

They had made a pact, Mina and Piero: if he were to worsen, she would not bring him to the hospital. Piero thought that he would go into a coma and then die. She promises, but then that dreadful day arrives, the terrifying respiratory crisis, and Mina, frightened, cannot do it. She cannot accept the idea of losing him and calls an ambulance. It’s one thing to make a pact, another to go through with it. Piero undergoes a tracheotomy: a surgical incision is made in his trachea to open an alternative airway to the natural one, and from that day on he will live attached to a ventilator, immobile, in bed. This artificial respirator is a device that inflates and deflates, pumping air into the body. Its measured sound is similar to the piston of a locomotive.

But their life does not stop. Piero read a lot, he devoured books. He would listen to a programme about books, Fahrenheit, on RadioTre, oxygen for every reader, and then he’d say to Mina: ‘I want this book. But we have no money.’ And Mina would joke: ‘But you’re rich, that’s why I married you!’ In reality they lived on a disability allowance of 450,000 liras a month, which today would be around 500 euros.

Piero also loves to paint: oil paintings. At first for pleasure: the chance to create, to take his mind off things. But as the disease progresses, his movements become increasingly difficult, so he asks Mina to shift the canvas under his hands according to the figure he wants to paint, while he holds the brush steady between his fingers. Mina then suggests that he paint smaller pictures: ‘Even the great artists have done it.’ In fact, his last works are small in size. Mina hoped that all this would allow him to remain attached to life. In her book she writes: ‘I really employed extraordinary lifesaving measures, but these extreme measures were a form of love.’