"My Pippi was very affectionate, not sappy. We were good together, it was like that right away, we loved each other with joy."
Iva Zanicchi remembers with unchanged love Fausto Pinna , her lifelong companion, originally from Carbonia, who passed away after a long illness on August 8th. Pinna was 74 years old, and had been at the singer's side from Ligonchio for almost 40 years.
"As soon as we woke up - she recalls today in an interview with Corriere della Sera - he would tell me: "You look beautiful this morning" and maybe I was a horror, disheveled, with swollen eyes. Or, when I put on makeup: "Don't wear anything, you look better like this, you're gorgeous, you don't need it". What does he want, I pretended to believe him. I told him stories and he laughed, laughed, said that no one in the world amused him like me. And I saw him happy and this gave me so much energy".
"We never left each other, not even for a day," she continues, "he came with me everywhere, I always wanted him by my side. Since his condition got worse, I cancelled all my commitments to be close to him. He had a very good nurse who looked after him, but at night he only wanted me and I didn't feel like separating myself from him either. By now he kept repeating the same question to me, like a refrain: "Do you still love me?" "Of course I love you," I reassured him and gave him lots of kisses. He suffered a lot. Last summer, while he was trying to carry some suitcases, he got stuck there. After four years of chemotherapy, a vertebra collapsed, he never walked again. He was a big man of 105 kilos, he shrunk to less than fifty. He died with me, at home, just me and him ."
The last moments «he was lucid when he asked me again: “Do you still love me?”. “Even more, otherwise I wouldn't be here, right? I love you so much, Pippi. You'll see that now you'll feel better and in September we'll go to Sardinia” ». And instead he would never return to his homeland.
(Unioneonline/D)