The essay by Marco Follini Via Savoia is released on Thursday 17 March from La nave di Teseo: portrait of the statesman in his studio
We do not want power because it scares us Aldo Moro wrote as a boy, during the war. And from there on – adds Marco Follini – the mysterious and demonic face of power it had always made him a little uneasy.
An omen of death seems to run through Moro’s entire long political life. Ten years before the kidnapping (the anniversary of which fell on Wednesday 16 March), on the eve of the 1968 elections, Padre Pio had seen blood, so much blood in his future: a prophecy, pronounced in the cell of the friar, which had upset Moro, to the point of inducing him to never tell anyone about it.
But at the center of the book, which La nave di Teseo publishes on Thursday 17 March, there is right from the title – Via Savoia – the Moor of freedom and everyday life, told in his studio in the Salario neighborhood: Far from home, far from the party, far from the government, if anything a little closer to the university, where he liked to teach and sometimes linger. The very young Follini was regularly admitted to his studio in via Savoia; but the author is not in the book. To be honest, no character ever mentioned by name, not even Moro: but all are perfectly recognizable. Including Eugenio Scalfari, who attributed to him the formula of parallel convergences: an expression he never uttered.
Moro was one of the targets of the youth protest; and he was murdered by the red terrorists. Yet he had many enemies on the right, in that conservative right that saw him as a succubus and accomplice of the Communists. In reality, Follini recalls, Moro intended to broaden the foundations of democracy. He wanted to unlock a system centered on Christian Democratic eternity. Hence the opening first to the socialists and then to the PCI. Not to please them and not to submit. But to recognize that even those worlds, those classes, those stories – so different from his – had the right to fully enter the life of the Italian state. Of this he lived, and of this he died – as is well known. Perhaps less well known, and less obvious, is that feeling of fragility that accompanied him throughout all those years. Almost like the threatening announcement of what could happen to him.
Moro is told as the antithesis of today’s politicians, obsessed with communication and speed. On the contrary, he looked suspiciously at chatter and haste. He was wary of displays of strength and sudden changes. If today the leaders intend to rekindle the troops and escalate the conflict, on the contrary, Moro had the problem of moderating the reactionary instincts that emerged from his world, and of bringing them back into the channel of moderation and mediation.
The fall follows the years of the DC secretariat and Palazzo Chigi, when the axis of Christian Democracy swings back to the right. But in 1974 Moro returns as head of the government, and when he is kidnapped by the BR the natural candidate for the presidency of the Republic. And instead everything ends in the retaliation of imprisonment, when he is photographed in shirt sleeves, he wearing a jacket and tie even on the beach as evidenced by a historical photo, and finds himself not being taken seriously by friends of his own party, of his own current. As if the words written by the people’s prison did not belong to him, and as if the attempt to open a dialogue was a sign of cowardice or a symptom of the Stockholm syndrome.
Follini concludes: In those days, in those hours, his end must have seemed to him the end of his world. Or maybe it was a sign that the world had never really begun. And not only because they had denied him the armored car, in Piazza del Ges they had not even given him a room, and the archbishop of Genoa Siri, on hearing the news of his kidnapping, commented: he got what he deserved.
The volume
It comes out Thursday 17 March Via Savoia (La nave di Teseo, pp. 224, euro 16) by Marco Follini; preface by Marco Damilano. The title refers to the address of Aldo Moro’s Roman studio (Maglie, Lecce, 23 September 1916 – Rome, 9 May 1978). Wednesday 16 March was the anniversary of the kidnapping of Moro (16 March 1978) and the massacre of the escort (Domenico Ricci, Oreste Leonardi, Raffaele Iozzino, Giulio Rivera, Francesco Zizzi). Follini, deputy from 1996 to 2006, senator from 2006 to ’13, was vice president of the Council. author of essays
March 16, 2022 (change March 16, 2022 | 19:52)
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