Goffredo Buccini was a young reporter when Mani Pulite broke out. Now he reconstructs that season in a book to be released for Laterza
The moment. A piece of Italian history. A process that becomes a show and a catharsis that remains suspended: because one enters with the flag of good and one leaves with that of doubt. The queue to enter, the crowded classroom, the live broadcast, Di Pietro questions Craxi in the name of (almost) all the Italian people, Bettino is extending his time with pauses, the revolution is killing the old parties and the rubble will bring a beautiful sun or even shadows, no one can say.
That December 17, 1993 Milan to drink seems a century away and appears (appears) like the black plague, the Cusani trial the representation of politics at the bar, the capitulation of Forlani with the foaming mouth has buried the DC and perhaps also the Christian piety. But Craxi arrives and the score blows up. Di Pietro appears shy, prudent, almost frightened, a mystery that remains a mystery, while the socialist leader repeats that everyone knew, politics has a cost, you had to compete with the Christian Democrats and the Communists. Perhaps that day Tonino imagined himself to be a politician and Bettino already saw himself in exile, we understood that Tangentopoli he had reached the summit and was taking the descent.
also an essay, of course, with the merit of research and the cult of facts. But above all the novel of a season and a generation, the biography of a country that asked for the guillotine when it hit politicians and managers and then denied it when it chased ordinary people. Goffredo Buccini wrote Time for clean hands (Editori Laterza) because he lived that era and could tell it in a direct and passionate way. Because thirty years have passed and it has a certain effect on us. But also because he owed it to himself. The reporter today a columnist of our Corriere della Sera is not a repentant, let’s not trivialize: for each key passage he becomes a question mark and sometimes even a self-criticism. With the expression on page 34, the sense of proportion among the first victims of this collective intoxication, which becomes the historical and psychological line of the essay-novel. The young journalists were the witnesses but often also the fighters of an epic: like a good part of the country, by the way. Time for clean hands too the age of illusion.
A Time.news that in the meantime has become history. Thirty years is a long time, the same time that runs from 1945 to 1975, when parents told us children about the end of the war and it seemed like another world. In the book the characters are as alive as in the theater, the writing is clear, always pleasant, without becoming simplistic, and the fresco works because it is a piece of us all. Buccini was in the front row, indeed between the front row and the stage, every now and then in the dressing rooms: the pool of reporters at Justice palace, the exclusive and disruptive interviews with Borrelli, the hunt for fugitives in Santo Domingo, the scoop of the guarantee notice to Berlusconi with his colleague Gianluca Di Feo in one of the most difficult and tormented nights in via Solferino.
The phone rings early and too much, writes Buccini. on the morning of February 18, 1992, they arrested the night before Mario Chiesa, act of initiation. To call Ettore Botti, head of the news of Milan del Corriere, talent scout by nature and culture: trust in the rules and journalism without ideologies and prejudices, skepticism on the myth of the shining city, indefinitely defense of his team of veterans and working kids together. Botti sends Buccini to the courthouse and changes his life: the fall of the Church, the start of the chasm, the first Republic it ended and we no longer know if we are in the second or third, we are lost somewhere.
Prison, prison, prison. Everyday. Here is the Davigo doctrine, arrest and confession as necessary steps to break the bond between bribes. The Italian ’92 the Mani Pulite pool, with Borrelli at the helm and Di Pietro who breaks everything, the Tangentopoli T-shirt with the places of the bribes, the cordon of common people around the Palace, the approach of investigations to Bettino Craxi, the line in the Public Prosecutor’s Office of a people of confidants and flagellants , substantive justice (all thieves in jail) which forces procedures and customs. The prosecutors are not magistrates but the avengers for years of abuse, corruption, inefficiency. And here Buccini goes straight to it: We journalists certainly marry militancy. And we guys in the pool of reporters are the vanguard, certain, very certain, that we are right. Not only. We are heroes of our own comic: if our truth is true, why look for another one ?. Italy had to change, as the veterans say Mediterraneo, the film by Salvatores.
The socialist Sergio Moroni, investigated, kills himself. The letter that leaves a whip: I don’t think this country of ours will build the future it deserves by cultivating a pogrom climate towards the political class. Craxi says they created an infamous climate, Gerardo D’Ambrosio he replies that they created the infamous climate, we limit ourselves to prosecuting crimes. And the young socialists counter-reply: The Milanese investigation is charged with an improper moral value, attributing it a role of popular revenge. A civil war of words. But they would also have committed suicide Gabriele Cagliari in a cell of San Vittore, Raul Gardini at his home, and others.
The Conso decree was born and immediately passed due to the opposition of the pool. The square is boiling, the coins rain down on Craxi, the Northern League player Leoni Orsenigo pulls out the noose in Parliament. The judicial revolution does not seem to go exactly in the direction of an enlargement of the country’s democratic area…. A labyrinth. The corrupt country (true), the prosecutors investigate (right), but the new era is starting to scare. Beyond the inquiries and intentions, the age of the belly was born in those days, it has not yet ended.
On the day of the funeral after the massacre in via Palestro, in Milan, here are Borrelli, Colombo and Di Pietro walking through the Gallery. People call them, follow them, embrace them, a riot of enthusiasm and anger: The gallows, the gallows, Di Pietro put them on the gallows! Borrelli the most lucid: It is not fair that it is so … but it is not our fault. The criticism of the easy handcuffs evaporates in the ovation of a crowd that does not ask for guarantees but invokes the gallows. Sergio Cusani, before the trial-event (a national autobiography), confides in the author of the book: The country after Tangentopoli could be much worse than it was before. The debate consecrates the character Di Pietro and closes fifty years of Italian political history, with its parties, its liturgies, its proportional system, its own polite and smoky language.
It’s up to the new Italian miracle, the new protest of the pool (against the minister Alfredo Biondi), the guarantee notice to Berlusconi, the farewell of Tonino Di Pietro. The anecdotes and background are many, the jokes of Paolo Mieli, then director, are not to be missed: but it would not make sense to burn the contents of the book. Clean hands real revolution or discovery of hot water? Sacrosanct or mutilated turn? Holy magistrates or avengers? The point, writes Buccini, that many young people in the nineties dreamed of (mistakenly, of course) a national palingenesis. We are still waiting for it.
Thirty years later there are no more Borrelli and D’Ambrosio. Di Pietro spends a lot of time in Montenero di Bisaccia, departure and return. Greco and Davigo broke up in a sensational way: a metaphor for a season and perhaps a category. Colombo travels around Italy and meets the boys to talk about legality, because he has known for a long time that the answer cannot be judicial. The morning after the handcuffs at Chiesa, last century, Ettore Botti also called those who are finishing this article: Corri al Trivulzio and tells how they got arrested. The hoarse, firm, deep voice, few words. A commander feared and loved: at the same time. In the etymology of nostalgia there is the word pain.
October 19, 2021 (change October 19, 2021 | 21:37)
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