Angela Terzani: «Tiziano and I, with wings on our feet. We spent hours imagining the future “

Here you are, love, this has been the key to a whole life. Pure love, unconditional love, which gives without asking for anything in return. «Besides, I don’t understand my obsession with wanting to be someone on my own – she wrote in those years – rather than be satisfied with the two of us as a couple. I could add it up, and divide the result by two “. And this is how Titian’s joys become his, that Titian’s goals become his, wars, reportages, books. A life in unison, a life dedicated to being a couple even before being an individual. A revolution, that of Angela, anti-heroine of our times. But it certainly wasn’t easy, especially if the man by your side is called Tiziano Terzani, in whose bowels an ardent magma of passions, restlessness, turmoil, irruptions germinates relentlessly. He ran from one part of the world to the other and she humored him, or rather no, she simply loved him. Because this is what it is: the happiness of one was the happiness of the other. A lesson in extreme altruism. «Tiziano began to live with wings on his feet – wrote Angela in 1967 – We spent hours imagining the future. The day he called me in Melbourne, I took the plane and ran there. ‘ And if ever needed, this book becomes revealing: if Terzani has become Terzani, much of the credit goes to a devoted and in love wife who, from the beginning, had understood everything, perhaps even more than Titian. And then Holland, Portugal, England, Australia, the United States coast to coast.

The book closely follows the first stages that consecrated Titian as a journalist. And then the birth of the children. Titian impetuous, even in fatherhood: he wanted his son to be called Folco Mao and, perhaps, to be born in Cuba. “But the employee in Harlem prevented it by explaining to Titian that Mao was not a proper name accepted in America”. Even earlier, the engagement between Santo Spirito and Bellosguardo: «I run along Via delle Campora in my anthracite overcoat, which I don’t like, to meet him who has a beautiful one, rotten green with tiny black squares. We watch Fire in the Hold, a movie with Rita Hayworth, at the Eolo cinema in via Pisana. While we sit next to each other in the dark, I feel strong again his determination not to waste my life and I fall in love with him for good. ” The urge to live is a real obsession for Tiziano. Angela reports a letter written by her husband before her engagement: “I’m twenty, maybe I’ve already spent half my life and haven’t done anything that will remain, nothing that will speak of me and my existence as a man. I’m so afraid of not being able to stop everything I have to say and tell others ». An effort to live next to him, but also a privilege, a whirlwind of overwhelming enthusiasm. Because he was like that, he plunged into the great opportunity of life to exist fully. And he dragged all the others. Sometimes exaggerated, like when he had the whole family moved to China. And when he went on long journeys, his children missed him. Folco fell ill with asthma: «The most serious attacks came to him at night, during the absences of Titian. Then I would pick him up and run with him through the park. ‘ An intense book, the one written by Angela, an intimate diary that tells a family and with it the great events of history, from Kennedy to Martin Luther King to Vietnam. And it is precisely on Vietnam that the book is interrupted. “If I stay healthy, the idea is to write the second part of our life together”.

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