She left this world the way she moved through it: stubbornly, stylishly, refusing to let anyone else write her final scene. From provincial theaters to smoky basements where her first torch songs rose like cigarette haze, she built a myth out of ordinary heartbreak. Her voice turned cheap neon bars into operas, and Italians quietly folded those melodies into their own private catastrophes: divorces, job losses, late-night trains pulling away from unlit stations.

Age never tamed her; it only sharpened the silhouette. She met each new wrinkle with a joke and each new scandal with a raised eyebrow, walking into studios and award shows as if the cameras were merely catching up. Politicians borrowed her words, fashion houses fought to dress her, but the true monument was the chorus of strangers humming her refrains in supermarket aisles. In the end, she imagined no marble, no mausoleum—just a Dior sheath, a plain coffin, and her ashes surrendered to the sea, dissolving like a final sustained note that no one could quite decide was grief or release.