“Don’t be angry Silvia if for a moment, in contravention of that delicate and discreet style of yours, hint of your fluid, quick intelligence, with that sarcastic irony daughter of the odyssey suffered with your father. I met you for the first time sitting on the sofa in via dei Piatti, where your father Enzo lived “. Thus begins the touching farewell letter that Gianluigi Nuzzi wrote for the death of Silvia Tortora, the journalist daughter of Enzo Tortora. The conductor of the Fourth Degree in fact wanted to remember in a post on Facebook the colleague who disappeared on Monday 10 January.
“We were in 1986, you think …“, Continues Nuzzi recalling his first meeting with his father. At the time he was 17 years old, he was at the beginning of his career and he picked up the outbursts of Tortora, an innocent victim of Italian justice: “He told me about the odyssey, the shame of the handcuffs, the humiliations and courage. He rolled his eyes and whispered a sentence in a low voice. ‘Sorry I didn’t hear’ … I tried … I was 17, my heart was beating fast … and he confided the greatest bitterness to me: ‘They made my daughters age thirty years old in one night’. And for him this was everything, because Enzo did not flaunt his family, he did not compulsive social media … on the contrary! He protected his privacy with that Genoese blush which means not shyness, but confidentiality and protection of loved ones “.
And again: “And it all happened fast with those letters you wrote to each other when he was in prison, collected in a book that has always been there and that I do not open unless I am aware of the strength to bear tears …Then maybe I made a mistake, looking in you for a trace of your father and I apologize for that, but you were elegant as always to make me appreciate what it means to build an identity after the storm with a grieving heart and a black horizon. I remember Ponza, Silvia, I remember our Roman meetings, I remember you above all that you had put yourself in defense of the very identity of a father killed by evil justice, rightly intolerant of the miserable speculations of those who misused your surname to profess innocence. Turtledove “.
Then he concludes with a heartfelt thanks: “If today I am what I am I owe it above all to the forces that formed me. Enzo first and then you were surely among them. Thanks Silvia “.