Thirty years ago. All media are focused on Clean Hands, a tsunami that undermines the political class (and not only) of our country. The emotional wave that crosses Italy is overwhelming, and the symbolic man is identified in the judge Antonio Di Pietrobasically unknown until then. So the hunt for photographs significant, emblematic, intense, in a word iconic, which portray him to illuminate the covers and pages of newspapers not only Italian but international: of Tangentopoliin fact, people are starting to talk all over the world. But these photos, around, are still in short supply.
And here it begins a singular story on the sidelines of the spasmodic research relating to the images concerning the character of the moment.
There is a photojournalist – myself – who in those years documented facts, places and people linked to current events for a publishing industry that was still in the pre-Internet era.
I often happened to be at the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan for photo shoots during trials that made news, and that building has always seemed to me – inside it – a city within a city, a sort of disturbing dystopia where the spaces are always too large, the neon lights too cold and acidic, the marble too funeral, the noises too unnatural. Between trolleys full of folders pushed with difficulty into the infinite gloomy corridors and handcuffed defendants sorted into the halls of their respective trials.
One day – while I think of everything except Di Pietro – the unexpected happens right there inside, something I still remember between dream and reality. Walking at a fast pace (the distances to be covered are considerable, in that huge building), my corner of my eye catches in an almost subliminal way a yellow glow: in the regular succession of doors – all the same as justice is for all – one, only one, is left ajar, and from that opening a blinding, warm, attractive light comes out, perhaps divine.
You know, if a photographer is not curious he has the wrong job, so I try to peek inside the classroom and rest of stone. Di sasso and Di Pietro.
Inside, more than the celebration of a trial, they would seem to be in progress the filming of Perry Masonand a normally sad place is a shining movie set.
Let’s reveal the mystery: filming is underway for an episode of the Rai program One day in the district courtwhich on that occasion recounts the phases of a process for a murder that took place in Milan on Christmas day of 1991. Nothing to do with Mani Pulite, a crime in the crime news like unfortunately many others populate those classrooms. But my eyes can hardly believe: the prosecutor who is making the harangue, perfectly illuminated by the powerful spotlights placed by “Mamma Rai”, is the most sought-after face of the moment: Antonio di Pietro himself. He speaks, gesticulates, adjusts his toga, alternates infinite expressions, always emphasized by the movements of the hands. On the cake offered to me by fate, in this “sliding doors”, there is also the icing: with a noteworthy aesthetic twist, the judge has chosen to wear a gold tiewhich is a perfect match for the toga cordoniere.
I slip inside dressing in invisibility, I disappear behind a cameraman in charge of filming, I take a camera out of my bag but we are in the age of Analogic photography: to take chromatically correct color photos in the presence of artificial light, used at that time, a specific film was needed, calibrated for “tungsten light”. In the courtrooms, on the other hand, film was normally used daylight with which, this time, all the photos would have turned out red. Sweats and worries, was I missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? In a side pocket of the bag I find a roll of film, only one (because “you never know”) of the right type, and sipping the thirty-six precious frames I take home a sequence that, I must say, has given me some professional satisfaction.
Today there is a lot of talk about the 30 from the beginning of Tangentopoli. I was there, doing my job as a photojournalist. Among the many photos I took then, regarding this expression of Di Pietro: perhaps it summarizes the many questions that today, having cooled the emotional wave, remained in the air pic.twitter.com/xFCNnZVsRx
– Leonello Bertolucci (@ilfototipo) February 17, 2022
Those photos were snapped upsuch was the thirst for good images concerning Judge Di Pietro at that time, and they were published on double pages and covers of weekly magazines in Italy and abroad, including the cover of the American Newsweek.
Today, seeing them again after thirty years, however, they have a different flavor, they carry “hindsight”, many questions, many considerations and many news. Not all of them as exciting as the atmosphere at the time.
That glimmer of warm light that comes out of a crack, while through the livid spaces of the Palazzo di Giustizia where the whole Mani Pulite affair took place, remains my most visually indelible memory and, to read it today, it was also the harbinger of all the questionable spectacle that followed.
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