During one of those summers when they brought me back to the house on the hill, I learned to read. In the city where we spent our winters, while taking walks through the streets with my young father – who carried his walking stick straight up as if it were a sabre, the handle tucked into the pocket of his coat – I would follow the tip of that walking stick which brusquely directed itself towards signs indicating antique or pastry shops, and I quickly figured out the relationship, the gravitational law, that brought letters together. The news reached my godmother, the solitary Gladys Vucetich, and she, too, came up that summer from her house on Via dei Cappuccini. She appeared to be in the permanent shadow not only of those enormous cedar trees but of her entire family line of military heroes, for whom she remained in a state of mourning. She came up in her black veils, oppressed by an almost mythological illness (which hadn’t kept her from ‘spending the entire war with the Red Cross’), her heavy step lightened by the striking of her black cane, her head covered by a rubber rain bonnet. Her very light-blue eyes – so light that her eyelids seemed transparent – were fixed in a slightly maniacal stare, one that held a persistent presentiment of disaster. Gladys Vucetich had herself once discovered in that huge impenetrable house (where the silence was such that at the very far end of the gloomy dining room one could hear the taps dripping in the distant kitchen filled with cookware from Carnia), the books of her childhood. And she came now too, with her oracular gift, no less prophetic than the gold pendant she had placed around my neck the day I was baptized, inscribed with all four of my names: Vittoria, Maria Angelica, Marcella, Cristina.

The books had very durable covers with lovely faded colours, and some looked quite gothic. On the cover of one, I recall a tall solemn female figure wearing a yellow headband ushering forward a young girl, her hands on her shoulders. Where to? The small space allocated to these two figures didn’t afford an answer. A kind of sweet horror transpired there, above all, in the face of the little child, who was a miniature replica of the woman – the same headband, hers greenish, her hair a little blonder, the same long peaked sleeves. Her eyes wide with astonishment, the child leaned back against the person standing over her, the anguished reluctance of her action revealing, like a mirror does, extreme fascination. Written underneath in eight large gothic letters was: FAIRY NIX. Nothing else about that feminine image of life’s journey hinted at its mysteries.

As was true for toy designers in that prediluvian era, the book illustrators would never even have understood if someone had suggested that they ‘assist the child’ in accepting the mystical characters she encountered (thereby, inevitably, ensuring she wouldn’t believe in them). Later, incorporated into that same vile pretext was the irreversible, rigid and programmatic distortion of figures that came about with the advent of cartoons: the smirks on the faces of the fake-baby-animal-like gnomes; the ogres’ wide-open eyes (‘Come now, don’t you see he’s not real? Can’t you see that even he doesn’t believe he’s real?’); iridescent inconsistency, from beetles to princes and princesses (‘In place of these characters here, who don’t have faces, you can put whomever you want, yourselves, for example’).