Nonna Giada

Nonna Giada never played at being beautiful, she played at being herself. Around the architecture of her marital bedroom, she created a small triptych of play: her bathroom, her dressing room, and her vanity table. Three stages that always fascinated her husband, because Giada Maria Corsini was a woman who had trained all her life in the art of freedom, with a sporting spirit, impeccably chic, and slightly irrational.

Nonna Giada’s bathroom was a place filled with vertical information and dominated by a large horizontal bathtub. From the walls hung many things: some long, some short, some hideous, some exquisite. But they all shared one thing in common: they were tools, as if each one were a different possibility of being. She kept fans she only used there, a collection of hair ties that looked like spiders, perfumes from all over Europe, turbans, scarves, and more than twenty pairs of reading glasses, all prescribed for a slight myopia.

She bathed in very hot water and only felt comfortable when the mirror fogged up. Her forehead would start to glisten, and that was when she began to sweat. She would grab a fan, wave it at herself, and laugh. She did not smoke, but sweating in the tub and fanning herself was her most personal vice. It was her way of reminding herself that things could make sense and matter to her, but they could also mean absolutely nothing.

Her vanity was an altar, and her hair, a secret. She used to say that hairstyle had always truly meant her style. “Hair is just an excuse to have a concrete way of thinking,” she would say. Nonna Giada did not believe in beauty standards; she believed in the game of beauty, with the good fortune that, if you are a woman, the game gives you far more room to play.

She was just over thirty and used to wear two buns, claiming that a woman should always have at least two contradictory ideas at the same time. And at the beach, she always wore a turban. She said a touch of elegance in the sand was essential, not out of vanity, but out of respect for the sea, which, she said, was the only lover who never disappointed her. “The wind,” she would laugh, “is the worst hairdresser, but it always makes you look like you’ve just had a good shag”.

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