Quicker than me, anyway. When she turned fifteen, she was already over one metre seventy. She slowed down a bit over the years that followed, ending up at one metre seventy-five, but those extra centimetres that hadn’t made her thighs, her back or her ankles any longer had spread elsewhere, swelling her bosom, curving her hips, plumping out her bottom. A small miracle of harmony, the figure of the heroine from an Italian graphic novel, the ones Papa hides in the library between Tintin and Asterix. A girl created by Manara.

That kind of girl.

Papa Giordano, probably in order to forget the smell of broccoli and enjoy the extra nineteen centimetres or so of his starlet, bought a villa on the slopes of Revellata and comes back here every summer. The little Calabrian princess, his sole heir, grew bored on her own in her stone palace, and every now and again, then more and more often, for longer and longer spells, her dad’s Suzuki 4x4 would drop her off between Alga beach and the Euproctes campsite so that she could enjoy herself with girls her own age. Girls, and boys.

In the summer of 1989, Papa and Mamma Giordano had set off to sail around Sardinia in their yacht, which was moored all year round in Calvi Bay, and Princess Chjara, having just reached the age of majority, had told them that there was no way she was going to spend the next month getting bored to death with them in a floating prison that measured thirty metres by ten.

She would manage on her own. Her father had dropped the keys of the villa in the palm of her hand.

Chjara didn’t barter.

And she did manage very well on her own.

Dancing the lambada better than Kaoma. Singing ‘Una storia importante’ better than Eros Ramazzotti. Delivering lines from Cinema Paradiso better than Agnese Nano, kisses included.

She was all set to be a star.

To shine in the galaxy before all the other stars went out.

To seduce or to perish!

Maria-Chjara. The story of a princess.

I’m still here in the shadows, on my bit of beach, on the edge of the pine trees with the needles digging into my bottom, Dangerous Liaisons lying open on my knees. All of a sudden Maria-Chjara got up from her towel, and Hermann the cyclops was left with his sticky hands in the air, stroking the void.

Not fast enough, Hermann … Ha ha ha!

Maria-Chjara got up just like that, without putting the top of her costume back on. She went and ordered a Coke at the other end of the beach, and the whole beach turned to look at her. I swear, from my slightly elevated observation point the spectacle was very striking, like a field of sunflowers following the course of the sun, but speeded up a thousand times. With poppies, pansies and ears of corn twisting on their stems as well.