My name is Nives Bruschi and I was born in the past century, but I will not tell you when, in Fossa, a small town between Concordia sulla Secchia and Mirandola, in the “lower” Modena Plains. In my infancy thoughts Fossa represents the ancient world where I lived, during my summer vacations, in my grandparents barns with their animals: the horse “Linda”, the cow “Bianchina”, the sow “Roia”, the Guinea hen “Cesira” and the haystacks on which I dove as an innocent and wild child would.

My parents had moved in a small town in the Tuscan-Emilia Apennines – Porretta Terme (in the province of Bologna) – where my father had opened a bakery and where he became

famous in the entire area for the quality of his cookies and for the production of the “zuccherini montanari” which he had reinvented starting from an ancient local recipe.

The bakery, which is now managed by my brother Boris, employed the entire family and I spent the first part of my life running among bags of flour and sugar as well as thousands of eggs (today my husband tells me that it was in those days that I learned how to “rompergli le uova” like no other woman can!); still today, especially in the summer – just for fun – I still help my brother.

Then, when I turned eighteen, I went to study Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Pisa.

In those days my hairdo was always a ponytail over three feet long. I tell you this not for vanity but because that ponytail has been the turning point of my life. As a matter of fact I was constantly chased all over the school by a boy from Puglia (in those days was still agile) who’s only desire was to pull my ponytail as if it was the rope of a church bell. I then discovered that he was an engineering student, but because in his classes girls were scarce, he would venture in the humanities section of the school in search of nice girls. He would even attend classes and some professors even thought that he was a languages student. So, to make it short, in order to stop him from chasing me around and pull my ponytail… I married him (but not before sharing with him the passion of parachuting… for him I even jumped out of a plane!) and I have given him two beautiful children: Francesco and Federico (they are both 34 and 28 respectively).