2024-03-23 15:50:50
by IACOPO GORI
The series of murders that shocked Italy between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1980s narrated from the point of view of the victims in the book «Nessuno» (Giunti) by Eugenio Nocciolini and Edoardo Orlandi
It is difficult to write today about the Monster of Florence. We have read and seen everything over many years without understanding each other much in the end. It is difficult to add something new to that tragic story that shocked Florence, Tuscany and the whole of Italy between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1980s of the last century: eight double murders of young and very young girls and boys, the majority of whom their privacy was violated and mutilated in a bestial manner without a reason.
A procedural story that never had a real end: leads and hypotheses of all kinds, sentences, convictions, appeals, releases, more or less mysterious deaths.
It is even more difficult to read a book about the Monster of Florence today if the dedication on the title page reads «To those who died for love»: the cliché risk seems just around the corner. And instead it happens that you start reading and you realize that you will never stop reading this book and that you will read it all in one go. Because it is not an investigation or a complaint or a new investigative lead, but a story that aims to do justice and dignity to the victims who for most today are now just empty names.
The (successful) objective is to let out the voices, the feelings, the words of the boys, some little more than teenagers, who found the most violent and disgusting death in the most beautiful and sacred moment of their unrepeatable youth: while they loved each other alone and defenseless in their intimacy inside a car in the moonless night of the Tuscan countryside.
They and their friends, their families, the voyeurs, the journalists, the investigators and all the other more or less aware interpreters of this 17-year tragedy are the narrators of a story that always unfolds in the first person. A story that is neither didactic nor fictional, but widely documented, a crossroads of voices that brings the reader face to face with the victims of the Monster (or monsters). A crescendo of emotions, words and sensations that overlap quickly and strongly in the narrative and in the head. A choral tale that grows from the bottom and rises to overwhelm both the protagonists and the reader.
It took two young newcomers to achieve this effect and write a book that can seem like the screenplay of a detective story or the text of a theater play or the collection of voices from a podcast. And the two started from the podcast almost as a bet: Eugenio Nocciolini – 36 years old, actor, playwright and podcast author – and Edoardo Orlandi – 36 years old, criminologist and criminal lawyer, also a podcast author. Two years ago, after meeting in a theater, they decided to self-produce it: they titled it Nobody and the success on the Internet (over one million streaming) certified that they had found the right key. At the Giunti publishing house they had no doubts, that podcast had to be written down.
Thus Nobody was born. Voices in the history of the Monster of Florence, in bookstores from March 20th.
So Nocciolini and Orlandi give us details that we didn’t know or to which we hadn’t paid the right attention. The face of eighteen-year-old Stefania in love with Pasquale, who confesses to her colleague her doubts about whether or not to indulge. The dreams of the two German boys Horst and Jens-Uwe, who touch hands in an open-air bar in Santo Spirito before being called “faggots” when Florence in the 1980s was the gay capital of Europe, but the newspapers wrote that the two were just “friends”. The smile of little Pia Rontini, just 18 years old, majorette of the Vicchio band. The crazy race of the Frenchman Jean-Michel, shot but not killed in the tent with Nadine, with the suggestion of the Monster who befriends them during a village festival until leading them to the pitch where he will kill them.
«Run Stefano run». Edoardo Orlandi’s father and his friend Stefano still dreams of him like this, while he runs, torn apart and killed on 22 October 1981 in Travalle, Calenzano, together with his Susanna. Stefano Baldi and Susanna Cambi were 26 and 24 years old. The same age as Edoardo’s parents who told their still young son the story of those two friends of theirs who had not been able to have a child like him because a Monster had taken them away one cold autumn night. And Edoardo – who grew up with this story – once he became an adult wanted to continue his father’s dream with the hope of waking up one day and finding Stefano and Susanna and their son next to him. With the hope that someone in his sleep could have given him back that life that no one canceled for them and distorted for a generation of young people who grew up in the eighties and nineties in and around Florence, all friends (even without knowing them) of those sixteen kids who are we were just unluckier than them. Because they found themselves loving each other in the wrong place at the wrong time. Without any fault.
Nocciolini and Orlandi will present the book in Florence with Iacopo Gori on Tuesday 26 March at 6.30 pm at the Giunti Odeon bookshop. On Saturday 6 April another meeting with the authors in Sesto Fiorentino at 5.30 pm at the Ubik Rinascita bookshop.
March 23, 2024 (changed March 23, 2024 | 4:50 pm)
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