If as a child I had known about Oriana Fallaci, to the question “what would you like to do when you grow up?”, I would have answered “I want to be Oriana Fallaci”.

I always admired her way of exaggerating, her extreme self-assuredness which allowed her to say what she thought, even when she was sometimes arrogant and provocative because she was full of “anger and pride”.

Right after the attack on the world trade center, she wanted to scream about her feelings of anger and pride to the entire world and the majority of us wanted to follow her lead. On September 11th 2001, a part of Oriana died.

Five years later, during the same month and almost on the same day, perhaps because of destiny, on the night between the 14th and the 15th of September 2006, Oriana left us, having succumbed to the Alien, as she used to call the kind of cancer that she suffered from in those years.

After the publication of Insciallah in 1990, the Tuscan writer went to live in New York. Here she began to write a novel that she would continue to work on throughout the ‘90s until September 11th 2001.

This was her last novel, published posthumously by her nephew Edward: “A Hat Full of Cherries” (Rizzoli, July 30th 2008) “A circular structure” makes her life similar to her last novel: both start off in Tuscany and return there in the end.

She was born in Florence on the 29th of June 1929 and chose to return to Florence to die, 77 years later.

Her novel starts in a small town in Chianti, Panzano, and ends in Tuscany. It is an extraordinary family epic that covers the years 1773 through 1889, with forays into the past and a future that leads up to the bombing of Florence in 1944 "True literature as she desired, what it would have finally been possible to declare without any hesitation about her, was ‘Oriana Fallaci, profession, writer”.