Eclectic and irreverent personality, Adelaida Gigli was born in Recanati in 1927. She, the daughter of the painter Lorenzo Gigli, spent her early years in the city of Leopardi. Moments of serenity that are portrayed in the canvases of her father, before the promulgation of the racial laws forced them to leave their native soil.
Thus begins the change of identity of the child which goes from her first name, that Adelaide which also belonged to her grandmother, to Adelaida. A final letter thus leads to the definitive departure from the mother tongue to move on to the adopted one which will become predominant not only in intimacy, but in his poems and in her writings. She then spends her adolescence and early adulthood in contact with the Argentine cultural environment, where she encounters David Viñas with whom she will build a family, giving birth to Mini and Lorenzo Ismael. Always in this period the electrocution occurs: the meeting with indigenous art in Merida. From this moment on the wise hands of the timotocuicas they will never abandon it again and with them the choice to become ceramist.
As happened during childhood, however, history repeats itself: the establishment of the military dictatorship decimated much of his affections, making her story and those of those around her an intricate maze of silences, resistances and emigrations. Precisely for this reason Bravi decides to insert himself into the story, as a witness narrator, sometimes also adding memories of his youth in Buenos Aires and operating a comparison between his own existence and that of this woman who he had the privilege of knowing and narrating.
With a literary operation the writer decides to open this sort of biography with a scene that does not belong to Adelaida, but to Mini. During a tailing, the girl decides to leave her newborn daughter in the hands of two strangers, to prevent her from being killed or kidnapped by the regime. The book thus opens with a word that is not pronounced, but which remains suspended in the reader’s mind, almost as if it were written on a page. Desaparecida: this will be Mini’s fate and subsequently also that of his brother Lorenzo Ismaeltwo of the various victims of those 70s who represented one of the cruelest chapters in the country’s history.
The protagonist thus returns to the Marche, where at the age of sixty-one she comes into contact with Bravi. And here the author returns to describe her to us at a crucial moment: in her hands she has Mini’s diary, and she doesn’t know whether to hand it over to her granddaughter who is now older than her, but unaware of the true story of her mother. Just as Adelaida took up her paternal legacy, now she becomes the bearer of that of her daughter and as a consequence Bravi does the same for her, accompanying us along this life which has always raised the values of memoryfrom the roots and of artistic resistance.
