Given the premises, it is understandable why Adriana Mulassano is more than entitled to talk about warrior women. And in fact, he doesn’t have to be told twice.

“We’re old: all right, let’s take note of it and try not to become heavy old women. I still have young people who come looking for me, which means that I can still talk about everything, because I read, I get informed, I criticize, I get pissed off. I am alive. It takes a lot of strength, so for me women warriors are also the old women, the people who have to make the transition between life and death as less tragic as possible. Because it’s a bad passage. Old age is not nice either, because you remember what you were before. Physically, of people around you, they all die for you… And in fact I stopped going to funerals. I’m very little of a warrior there. Because it’s useless, and as I always say, ‘I already have to go to mine.'”

Well, just a few words are enough to understand what kind of woman Adriana Mulassano is: someone who doesn’t send her to say, who doesn’t care about the abused concept of political correctness. One that has a taste for boutade, too.

“It’s not that I’m a poor lunatic who thinks I’m eternally young. I don’t have it, but I’m an active old woman. And that’s a milestone. And to get there, you have to fight yourself. Fighting the ghosts of old age. But that’s even when you’re in your twenties. On the correction of one’s own anomalies, of one’s own defects, of one’s relationship with others: it’s all a war.”

And it is in this regard, when we ask her what she thinks of the so-called “performance society” of which there is so much talk, that Mulassano makes it very clear: “Performance is a word that I detest, I abhor. Anything that is competition on trivial things is not a performance. To become like Chiara Ferragni and then end up badly for a panettone? It takes you there, also because the cultural level is mind-boggling. The other warrior women are the ones who fight for culture. When I go to Feltrinelli to look for a book and I see these piles of Vespa or Clerici books, I am disheartened. That’s where the performances get you there.”

Adriana doesn’t want to know anything about barricaded women, who choose their battles (badly) just to conquer the social limelight. However, if we ask her for an identikit of the warrior woman, she warns: “There is no way to recognize them: it is life that makes you become like this. If you started from a young age to have critical motions towards society… Now more than anything else the difficult thing is to raise the children, those are real warriors. People who lead infamous lives to feed their children. Six million real poor. People who fight with a lot of dignity. I see them in supermarkets, you recognize them immediately. From how you approach life, society, your work: from that you can understand if you have a warrior spirit or not. It’s a matter of drives, you have them or not. I know a lot of renunciators. People who put everything away: their pride, their dignity, their ability to react.”