For more than a century now, her family had made its living from the cascatura, the old Sicilian custom of keeping hair after it has fallen out or been cut, in order to make hairpieces or wigs. The Lanfredi workshop was the last of its kind in Palermo. Ten expert workers disentangled, washed and treated the skeins, which were dispatched to wig-makers across Italy and the whole of Europe. On her sixteenth birthday, Giulia had decided to leave school and join her father in the workshop. Her teachers said she was a gifted student, especially her Italian teacher, who urged her to continue her education – she could have gone to university. But nothing would dissuade Giulia from her chosen path. Hair was more than a tradition for the Lanfredi; it was a passion, passed down from generation to generation. Oddly, Giulia’s sisters showed no interest whatsoever in the family business. She was the only Lanfredi daughter to take it up. Francesca had married young and didn’t go out to work: she had four children now. Adela, the youngest, was still at school, and had set her sights on a career in fashion, or modelling. Anything rather than join the workshop.

For special orders and unusual colours, Papà had a secret: a formula inherited from his father, and his grandfather before him, based on natural ingredients whose names were a closely guarded secret. This was the formula he had passed on to Giulia. Often, he would take her up to his attic laboratorio, as he called it. You could see the sea from there, and Monte Pellegrino on the other side. Dressed in a white coat that made him look like a Chemistry teacher, Pietro would boil up his mixture in huge pans. He knew how to bleach hair and dye it again, so that the new colour would hold fast when washed. Giulia studied the process for hours, attentive to his slightest movement. Her father watched the pans of hair like her mother watched the pasta on the stove. He stirred the hair with a wooden paddle, left it to stand, then stirred it again, tirelessly, over and over. He was patient and painstaking, and there was love and care in his handling of the hair. One day, he liked to say, this hair will be worn. It deserves the greatest respect. Sometimes, Giulia found herself daydreaming about the women who would wear the finished wigs. Sicilian men didn’t tend to wear hairpieces – they were too proud, too attached to their idea of virility.