In Leo’s book 20 years of life that the disease did not cancel

Leo was only 18 when he discovered that he had a terrible disease that had crept into his body with perfidy; and only 20 years when, in 2019, his courageous struggle ended. But nothing of that brief, painful, energetic battle has been lost: his story has become a story and the story has now become a book. «My book» – presented in Treviglio – has as its subtitle «Images, texts and poems by Leonardo Ghilardi». The young man from Treviso, struck by a sarcoma in the bones against which two years of harsh therapies were not enough, during the period of treatment matured the idea of ​​telling his own experience and sharing it with others: therefore he sketched the outline of his work, he imagined it filled with content, she began to write the first chapters.

The unfortunate evolution of the situation suddenly cut short the literary path, but certainly not its spirit and its contents: alongside the first, short chapters already written on the PC, Leo accumulated various other material: notes, reflections, photos and drawings, collected videos in a YouTube channel. Above all a lot of projects, because Leo always had his mind full of projects, even and above all when his horizons seemed to reserve very few perspectives. And the main of all those hypotheses, namely the book, is now a concrete reality, thanks to the commitment of his family who wanted to fulfill a dream: his mother Cinzia, his father Stefano, his sisters Chiara and Maddalena have put their precious capital in order. bequeathed by their warrior, resulting in a volume of 112 pages that exudes emotions, feelings, a great desire for life. Always, however, despite everything. It has the title “My book” because it is Leo who speaks in the first person: he tells what happened to him without sparing the details, not even the crudest, between chemo reverberations and ups and downs of mood. Embedded between the pages are also some of the great passions cultivated by the boy: skating, cooking, art; while the expressive forms find their outlet in a series of poems and sketches, weightings and images.