By Gianluca Semeraro

MILAN (Reuters) -Four steps separated Ornella Vanoni from the life she craved: the four steps leading up to the stage of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro.

“I twisted my nerves, I pulled my hair,” she recalled in her memoir, “Vincente o perdente” (“Winner or Loser”), of the fear that gripped her in the mid-1950s. “I wanted to be there, up front, but those few metres separating me from the stage were terrible.”

Finally, the theatre’s director declared that it would take a miracle for her to perform in public. In defiance, she did.

“There are birth dates that are not recorded in paperwork but which are, instead, the days when you finally become who you really are,” she wrote of that inaugural act of daring.

Vanoni would go on to become a leading voice in Italian music and one

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