Mozart with a smirk, Da Vinci with six octaves, a man who can sing 'Il cielo in una stanza' and then scream various trash metal obscenities in your ears. It was 1990, and I remember his long hair swirling on the disrupted screen of my TV in the living room while my father yelled at me to lower the volume, but Mike yelled louder. Mike Patton, the one who in the 'Ashes to Ashes' music video suddenly made me understand what puberty was. The one who for me remains perpetually within the perimeter of an undiagnosed condition.

The woman who taught me to scream when the only ones doing it were men, the woman who has been considered a murderer for almost thirty years, the one who accompanied my adolescence saying, 'Do not hurt yourself, destroy yourself, mangle yourself to get the football captain. Be the football captain.' Forever in debt. Forever "too early for that dress".

It went as it had to: I had a crush on an older guy who didn't even notice me. I checked out his likes, discovered Nirvana. It was 1995, Cobain had been dead for a year, I was 11 years old, and nothing, no conception of the world and my feelings, would ever be the same.

I still can't believe he's gone. That era had already ended, and I expected it would accompany us until our old age, experiencing new things. The only voice that could compete with Patton's.

When I'm sad, when I'm happy, when I need to focus, when I want to distract myself: this playlist does it all by itself. "Do you remember that evening when the two were kissing and you were alone? Chopin descended from the attics of God, struck you forever in the nape, making you great and unhappy". (Dino Buzzati)

I can't choose just one. From Pushkin to contemporary authors like Erofeev, I can't pick. All of them have literally given me air to breathe since I was 13 years old. Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Dovlatov, Sklovsky (and I'm forgetting someone) are my comfort food, they are my solace in the storms of the world, and it's to them that I return like to a happy home. I owe them everything I know.

Franz Kafka, the man who died unable to swallow, a man who felt disgust for himself but had the most beautiful eyes in the world. One of the few who can make me cry even on a reread. The man who, to spend a few hours with Milena Jesenskà, crossed Europe from Prague to Vienna, with tuberculosis and by train. The one who occasionally makes me think, 'Now I'll send my CV to Generali just so I can say in the application, 'because even Franz worked here'".

Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I share the same birthday, which kind of dampens the enthusiasm of astrology fans, I suppose. Gabo, Galeano, Borges, Cortazar, Bolaño, Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado have literally taken me and thrown me into a reality I could never have imagined and a dream I could never have dreamt. Special mention to Osvaldo Soriano and his fùtbol stories, no one wrote them like him. And my thoughts and heart also go to the 'sombras de tierna furia,' the Zapatistas of Chiapas who have been writing the reality that seems like a fairy tale since 1994.

Thomas Bernhard (his insolence gets on my nerves, his soliloquies drive me crazy, and his writing leaves me on my knees because it’s exactly the talent I wish I had), Claudia Durastanti (we’re the same age, and I feel a reverence for her that I only feel for the greatest), Joseph Roth (the only Roth I actually enjoy reading, sorry). And then there’s art, design, Italian cinema of the ’60s, coffee, dark chocolate, stationery, koala-shaped pens, homemade bundt cake.

My mother’s voice, my sister’s laughter, my father’s indomitable will.