Author of great reports, he decided to treat himself in public hospitals to experience the serious sufferings of the humblest sick. He courageously recounted his hard ordeal
«For almost a year a smell of ether, alcohol, antibiotic, lysoform has been chasing me, and this olfactory cocktail pinches me in the nostrils, soaks me to the bone, has stuck to my skin. .. “. God knows how much Gigi Ghirotti he would have liked not to be remembered for the extraordinary incipit of that investigation into “La Stampa” destined to become a formidable book of denunciation published by Eda with the title Long journey through the tunnel of disease. He wrote it to Giovanni Giovannini right from its release in bookstores: “I hope that my friends are friends to the end and that they do not make me the Enrico Toti of carcinoma but know how to exhort to see beyond the personal case”.
It annoyed him, self-deprecating as he was, to be remembered with that stuck label. It wasn’t just that, his life. “Gigi the Dormouse”, in the words of his friend Gigi Meneghello, the author of Little Masters with whom he had studied at the Pigafetta high school in his Vicenza, “he was already a journalist at school” and wrote about Enea “with the air of a special correspondent following that messy cruise: he described the sea dog hat of the captain at the helm, his shoulders bent under the downpours, he was interviewing Acate, Palinuro… ».
Born in the Palladian city on December 10, 1920, volunteered among paratroopers (but immediately sorted into the rear for having fractured his legs on the first launch), smeared in the Resistance (“he only grabbed a shovel to bury the dead”), he began in summer of ’45 at the «Giornale di Vicenza». Renato Ghiotto, the director, will remember: “He soon learned all there is to learn except one thing: prudence. So it was that, with one of his first articles, he threw a duel challenge on me. Since then, putting himself on the side of the poor and humiliated, he wrote a piece in their name against one of the notables of the city, who accused of having abused his power ».
Hired at «La Stampa» in Turin by Giulio De Benedetti afterwards a long apprenticeship of pieces written as a collaborator, he came to occupy himself indefatigably with everything. From the encounters with great artists (“A piece of bread fifteen meters long and abandoned in the square of a small Normandy town gave Salvatore Dalí the reputation of being the most extravagant man in the world”) to the portraits of Eleonora Duse arriving in Asolo «With the trunks of her books and her stage clothes» and «she avoided the people, she who lived among the applause» by asking a faithful knight: «At what time can you go out without being seen?». And then magical tales about Christmas from Padre Pio (“In the Bethlehem of San Giovanni Rotondo tomorrow at midnight the Child will be placed on the manger by an old friar on whose hands blood blooms mysteriously”) and reports on poor Italian emigrants who in France “do not they just don’t learn the French language, but they forget the Italian one ». Not to mention the Time.news of Luigi Tenco’s suicide (“Mike Bongiorno, who last night, just before the verdict, welcomed his last outburst, says:” How many times have we told him: ‘But why don’t you show up on television? ingenuity you have, you could earn what you want! ‘. He always replied:’ We are not there, that’s not what I care ‘. “ complaints about poverty in the Po Delta: «The inhabitants of Scardovari believe in spirits, the evil eye and witches. To get rid of migraines they do not take the cachet prescribed by the doctor: they go down into the marshes with a knife in their hand and “cut” the water of the Po. They know no socks. To keep children’s feet warm, mothers press a little straw into their clogs. ” He was a giant, “Gigi the Dormouse”. Able to write great books like Mitra and Sardinia on islander banditry or My Italy though on the economic boom and at the same time delicious elzeviri on the hotel porters who wondered about the painful sunset of the stiffelius and on the obligation to please customers even if at ten in the evening they ask for a soup for their walking turtle.
Illness, writes Alberto Sinigaglia, presenting the rich anthology The extreme investigation (Aragno), hit him at the age of fifty like a knife. And one evening in May ’72, near Piazza Navona, he explained to Vittorio Gorresio that for heaven’s sake, everything was fine with the newspaper, but “It is a certain Mr. Hodgkin who is bothering me.” In the afternoon the doctors had confirmed the diagnosis: he had Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Difficult to cure. They both fell silent. Until Gigi shook himself: «You know what I’m telling you? I believe I can do a good service as a correspondent in the tunnel of the disease of the century ». And “down to laugh – Gorresio will testify – attracted by his fascinating find”.
“Was it really necessary for you to inform millions of Italians about the disease, breaking a tradition of confidentiality that protects the most unpleasant personal facts?”, “Panorama” will ask him. more ferocious and mysterious fortresses of privacy. It almost seems that the disease is a fault, a shame to be kept hidden ». And this no, he could not accept it. Even the refusal of private clinics to face the ordeal in the sometimes filthy and chaotic dormitories of various public hospitals was necessary for him: “I hope that at least those of my generation can understand me who have, amid errors and horrors, participated and animated the great hopes of 1945: the hopes, I mean, of a different Italy in which, for example, it is not lawful to heal or die based on wealth or social privilege. I am not an Enrico Toti of the disease. I like to live: I have a healthy and fucking fear of dying. I am horrified by the idiot death, the death from overtaking, from the highway, from level crossing, from hunting. To death from illness I try to resist, I commit myself with all my strength to push it back. However, I find that there must be an epilogue, and it is right that it be faced without whining. It is an unpleasant event, but not unnatural and unavoidable. It was a serious moment for me: choosing the individual emergency exit, going to France to take care of myself, seemed to me like an escape. An escape from myself, from my way of being, from my responsibilities towards those who, in my country, have no way out “.
And he told everything, drip after drip, in ten episodes on “La Stampa” and then in two Rai television evenings that earned him the immense gratitude of millions of Italians who had lived through the interminable waits on their skin, the terrible meals where barely after lunch came dinner, the afternoons of empty because the doctors worked in the hospital only in the morning (“A steel mill that turned off the blast furnaces at 1pm to allow staff to spend the afternoon with their families or wherever they see fit, would scream scandal!”), The contempt for privacy, the death of roommates who had done «Rediscover friendship» … In short: «You have to be very well in health, to be able to afford the luxury of being sick, and to face hospital life with some hope of getting out of it». He left on July 17, 1974. Until the end, it became known, he had recommended to his wife Mariangela: «Help me to steal even a single minute from death. We will make her suffer ».
The meeting
The conference underway in Vicenza at Palazzo Cordellina is entitled “Gigi Ghirotti: 100 years + 1”. The meeting, which ends on Saturday 11 December, was scheduled last year, but has been postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The conference is organized by the Bertoliana Library of Vicenza, which also preserves the papers of Ghirotti, a journalist born in Vicenza on December 10, 1920 and who died in the same Venetian city on July 17, 1974. The meeting is attended by various personalities from journalism and medicine. A National Foundation (Fondazioneghirotti.it) and an Association based in Genoa (gigighirotti.it) are named after Ghirotti. Both are involved in assistance to cancer patients and families. Last year, for the centenary of his birth, the publisher Nino Aragno published an anthology of Ghirotti’s reportage entitled “The extreme investigation”, edited by Alberto Sinigaglia
December 9, 2021 (change December 9, 2021 | 20:59)
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