Mozart with a smirk, Da Vinci with six octaves, a man who can sing “Il cielo in una stanza” and then scream all kinds of trash metal obscenities in your ears. It was 1990 and I remember his long hair swirling on the flickering screen of my TV in the living room while my father yelled at me to turn the volume down but Mike was yelling louder. Mike Patton, the one who in the video for “Ashes to Ashes” suddenly made me understand what puberty was, and it hit hard. The only man who could make me let myself be devoured by mosquitoes on the grass at “Magnolia” on a sweltering day in June 2024. The one who for me will always remain within the perimeter of an undiagnosed condition.

I can’t choose just one. From Puškin to contemporary authors like Erofeev, I really can’t choose. They have all handed me the air I breathe since I was thirteen. Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Dovlatov, Sklovsky (and I’m surely forgetting someone) are my comfort food, they are my caress in the storms of the world, they are the ones I return to like a happy home. I owe them everything I know.

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.

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 the evening when the two were kissing and you were alone? Chopin descended from the attics of God and struck you forever at the nape of your neck, making you great and unhappy." (Dino Buzzati)

The woman who taught me to scream when the only ones doing it were men, the woman who has been considered a murderer for 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 indebted, Courtney. Forever too early for that dress, and forever I will want to be the girl with the most cake.

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.

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 Jesenská, crossed Europe from Prague to Vienna, with tuberculosis, a world war in the middle, and by train. The one who occasionally makes me think: "Now I'll send my CV to Generali, so I can write in the application, 'because even Franz worked here.'"

Thomas Bernhard because his insolence gets on my nerves and his soliloquies drive me crazy and his writing leaves me on my knees because he has the talent I wish I had. Joseph Roth because he is in fact the only Roth I love reading, sorry. Pier Vittorio Tondelli who swears in his books and my thirteen-year-old self had never seen anything like that.

And then art, design, Italian cinema of the 50s and 60s, coffee without sugar, 90% dark chocolate, extra-strong licorice, stationery, koala-shaped pens, homemade bundt cake, blueberries in Greek yogurt.

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