"She had one arm around her neck, but she felt that the world still listened to her. She turned as was her habit her gaze beyond the ceiling in search of words and dictated to me without doubt or hesitation an article that revealed the failure of her dreams, but not of the enthusiasm of those who still had those dreams. He said that in the spaces under the moon, where those boys had talked about flowers and made love, a few years later they had ended up talking about how to get hot water into the attics. They had ended up talking about renunciations and the danger of dreams. About the price of oil and weapons. Then Nanda looked me in the eye. "History is made by you guys with your long hair, you sons of bitches that you are!" To her, who had known the beats very well, it only remained to wish us, the new generation of disconsolate youth, to do at least some of those libertarian actions." 

It is with gentleness and great esteem that, in these pages, Enrico Rotelli recounts Fernanda Pivano: he does so as her assistant - he has been since 2004 - but above all with the vehemence of a young man not yet 30 who, faced with an uncertain future, dreams of the adventure of revolution and literature. He has been at her side in recent years, helping her write perhaps the most important work of all: her autobiography. And now, in this touching memoir that has the flavor of a coming-of-age novel, he relives those years, the journeys, the encounters with the best geniuses of a bygone era but not for this reason lost, indeed always alive and vibrant from generation to generation, and thus composes the portrait - intellectual and deeply human - of one of the most authentic and disruptive figures of Italian literature.