In 2001 the disease worsens and Piero loses heart. ‘It’s all over,’ he says. ‘Enough.’ Muscular dystrophy is a disease that destroys the body while, in most cases, leaving the mind intact. The patient is therefore absolutely lucid, conscious of wasting away and aware of his suffering. Piero asks his wife to support him in his request to disconnect the respirator. Mina gets angry, she cannot accept it, for her it’s as if he were saying that he wants to leave her. It’s as if he were telling her: ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ And so her response is: ‘I won’t give you a divorce!’ Then Piero, who knows her so well, calls her over as he always does by clicking his tongue, and asks her to put her hands around his neck. ‘Come on now, don’t be like that, I understand completely.’ Mina often says: ‘I was his nurse, he was my psychologist; he always knew how to handle me.’ Mina thought it was Piergiorgio who was being self-centred, but later she comes to realize that she was the self-centred one.

Piero then begins the battle, along with the Radical Party, for permission to disconnect the respirator. In 2002 he begins writing a blog, which he will update constantly until the final day of his life. He writes under the pseudonym of Caliban, the character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: a monster, a deformed, freckled savage ‘not honoured with a human shape’. Through this forum he comes into contact with people from all over the world who have the same urgency he has, who are experiencing the same suffering that he is.

Piero wants to get quickly to what he calls a ‘dignified death’, doing everything within the law. What he’s asking for is not euthanasia, that is, the practice of bringing about the death of a human being suffering from an incurable disease as painlessly and swiftly as possible, without bloodshed, in order to put an end to his suffering. He’s asking for the law to forgo extraordinary lifesaving measures, namely, all those medical techniques that serve to artificially maintain the vital functions of patients with incurable diseases. He doesn’t want to shorten his life by causing his own death. As Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini puts it: ‘By declining artificial life support, he’s not trying to cause his death, but accepting the fact that he can’t stop it.’ People who go to see him, not understanding this, say to Mina: ‘He wants to die because he’s dejected, because he’s not getting the proper care.’

On 22 September 2006, Piero decides to send a video-letter to the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano. By now he’s become accustomed to using a speech synthesizer: on the monitor in front of him are letters, which he indicates with his eyes, and the synthesizer produces the words he wants to say. His message is the poetic manifesto of his battle for life: