Thirty years after the Capaci massacre, the novel by Felice Cavallaro (released on April 21 for Solferino) offers a moving portrait of a woman and her thirteen years of love with Giovanni Falcone
On May 23, 2022, 30 years will have passed since the Capaci massacre. To tell that dark season of Italian history Felice Cavallaro – the colleague who for decades has been telling the readers of the Corriere about Sicily – has written a compelling novel about life, about torments, on the love between Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo. And the title of the book, released on April 21 by Solferino, could only be Francesca.
Suffocated by the horror of the mafia, the love story has a synthesis in the note that Francesca, sitting at the desk in the study, writes the night of the Addaura attack, when Falcone decides to stay alone in the villa by the sea where they risked being killed. And she, alone in the town house, in via Notarbartolo, takes one of the fountain pens of her man, writing a sentence that will remain engraved on a sheet found after the Capaci massacre: “Giovanni, my love, you are the most beautiful thing in my life. You will always be inside of me as I hope to remain alive in your heart, Francesca ».
Thus the text opens, with a prologue that immediately introduces us to a female dimension, bringing the protagonist to the fore. A woman, a wife, an accomplice who will follow her man to the end. Daughter, sister, wife of magistrates e magistrate in turn, Francesca is immediately aware of how complex her life with Giovanni will be, and perhaps, in her heart, even of what one day could lead to the dramatic ending.
The love story is re-proposed against the background of events that mark the development of an intimate and reserved sentimental tale, of their first encounters, of the hands that intertwine for the first time in a bar, of the candor that captures Giovanni, of the smile that conquers Francesca. With torment she leaves her first husband, a good and loving man, captured by affinities and spiritual understanding that she feels for Giovanni, fought and finally determined to indulge the spark that exploded in her heart. The protagonist of a life punctuated by anxiety for what is happening around, from bombs to murders, from security systems to infinite punishment because colleagues and friends also fall, Francesca, engaged in a Palermo where she works as a magistrate of the Juvenile Court, helps those who she needs, without sparing herself for the children of the prisoners, ready to comfort women in mourning in which she sees reflected every time the anguish of herself and her mother.
Cavallaro traces his life since adolescence. First brilliant student, then judge at the Court of Agrigento, she will become deputy prosecutor at the Court for minors of Palermo, Councilor of the Court of Appeal of Palermo and finally in Rome she will be part of the Commission for the competition for access to the judiciary. In addition to being the companion of a great man, the figure of Francesca Morvillo dominates in the story for his professional skills, for the attention to the weakest, for its fight against abandonment, arrogance, violence. She will follow her husband in every move, he will listen to her fears, he will support her choices, but not as a simple shadow because Francesca will also be a precious professional support for him in the fight against the mafia. The plot unfolds like a novel it rests upon real events and episodes, however, intertwined with a couple of symbolic figures like those of a friend and colleague of Francesca and a journalist close to her. The love story (it is the first chapter of the book) begins in 1979, during a trip to Trapani, in which Francesca participates reluctantly. That day she is accompanied by her first husband, but a shock between her and Giovanni is immediately felt. We will arrive at the divorce and, then, at the coexistence incredibly opposed by the highest magistrate of Palermo who speaks of an “affair” threatening a complaint to the CSM. The same magistrate who will ask the founder of the anti-mafia pool, Rocco Chinnici, to curb Falcone’s investigations. The same magistrate father of a friend of Francesca, a young man who, tried by feelings of guilt, will finally commit suicide with a gunshot causing another torment in the protagonist: “We are all victims of this city …”.
The love story is solidified in wedding of May 1986. A restricted and secret ceremony, officiated by Leoluca Orlando, present as the only witness of the couple Antonio Caponnetto, Chinnici’s successor.
Prominent figures in Francesca’s life are mother Lina and her brother Alfredo, also a colleague of Falcone. During the thirteen years lived together, around Francesca and Giovanni it consumes itself a real slaughter. Friends, colleagues, servants of the state, some with their wives, become targets of the mafia. Among others, Piersanti Mattarella, Gaetano Costa, the prefect Dalla Chiesa and his young wife Emanuela Setti Carraro, Rocco Chinnici, Antonio Cassarà, the agent Antonio Agostino and his pregnant wife Ida Castellucci fall.
Francesca, deeply troubled by the sequence of deaths, identifies herself above all with those young women who are no longer alive or with the mothers who mourn them. And she sees in those anguished profiles the face of mother Lina, assiduous presence and backbone of her life. That’s why she, one by one, she decides to meet those mothers full of pain, to comfort and hold them, as if he sensed that one day someone in his place will be able to do it with his mother.
The presentation in Milan
Published Thursday 21 April by the publisher Solferino «Francesca. Story of a love in time of war »by Felice Cavallaro (300 pages, 18.50 euros). The novel will be presented in Milan on 11 May at the Sormani Library in Corso di Porta Vittoria (Sala del Grechetto, 5.30 pm). Don Luigi Ciotti, Ferruccio de Bortoli, Nando Dalla Chiesa, Alfredo Morvillo and Rosaria Schifani converse with the author. Felice Cavallaro (Grotte, Agrigento, 1949) is the creator of an itinerary that connects the places of Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Camilleri, Sciascia, the route of the «Strada degli Scrittori», the association he founded and directs. Cavallaro worked for the newspaper “L’Ora”, Time.news, Rai, “Giornale di Sicilia”, before arriving at “Corriere della Sera”. With Solferino he published «Sciascia l’heretico» (2020).
April 16, 2022 (change April 16, 2022 | 20:59)
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