As a child, she would have wanted to be an explorer of darkest Africa. She read all the travel books, "the cannibals who ate explorers..." She would have been an explorer, but of the skies. The Lady of the Stars. Margherita Hack died, today, 13 years ago: she was 91 years old. And in any case, she would have continued to live and shine in the asteroid dedicated to her, 8558 Hack.

Born in Florence, adopted by Trieste, astrophysicist, director of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, "Marga" was an extraordinary science communicator. She explained, told stories, advocated, with honest simplicity. A 2012 book, titled "I Believe", edited by Marinella Chirico and published by Nuova Dimensione (176 pages, €14.90), brings together Hack with Pierluigi Di Piazza, that is an atheist with a priest, on topics ranging from love to passion, from life to death, from civic to political commitment, from animals to the environment. And to sport.

Margherita Hack's first passion was football, thanks to Aldo, who would become the man of her life: "He found me when, one summer morning, at the public garden of Bobolino, in Florence, where I spent my vacations, he approached me asking if I wanted to play with him and his friends: 'You have the ball, we are four and we could have a tournament'. Aldo was thirteen years old, almost two years older than me".

Then Hack fell in love with cycling: "I spent other summers at Bobolino, with groups of boys and girls with whom we played long games of 'prisoner's base', until in '37 I was promoted to first year of high school and my parents gave me the longed-for bicycle, and I replaced the ball games in the park with long solitary rides from Florence to Prato, to Pistoia, in Mugello, in Chianti, along the Arno valley".

Then came the passion for athletics: the meeting with "Danilo Innocenti, called 'Piccio', coach of Giglio Rosso, and with him I began to do athletics – high jump and long jump – and my afternoons were marked by training and competitions".

But there was always, and there would always be, the bike: "Andrea Falorni, a boy my age who worked as a radio technician in a shop in the center. With him there was a beautiful, long friendship. On Sundays, when I didn't have to compete, we went on bike rides, including the one on Ferragosto of '40, which was our record: Florence-Viareggio and back, two hundred kilometers on the heavy bicycles of those days, without gears, made even heavier by numerous patches on the tires. Because of the war, in fact, you could no longer find inner tubes or tires".

It was an undertaking: "That morning we got up at dawn and left at four, arriving in Viareggio around noon; we ate what little was still not rationed and, after swimming in the sea, still soaking wet, we took the road back, around four in the afternoon, finally arriving home at two in the morning! From Andrea I learned to assemble and disassemble the bike, patch tubes and change tires".

Margherita Hack was a curious and courageous cyclist: "the daily little ride", the interpretation of Alfonsina Strada in the video with the Tetes de Bois, the meeting with Alfredo Martini at the Ernesto Ragionieri Library in Sesto Fiorentino, the biography "My Life on a Bicycle" (Ediciclo, first edition in 2011)... "Happiness – she said – for me, is made of small things".