My holidays are spent with the nose into papers and the hands on the computer keyboard, working on quinquennial report. But I am back to my family in Italy, specifically in Sanremo, city of flowers, city of music, as it used to be the largest flower market and an important production center of flowers, and it hosts the most followed music festival in Italy. It is then not that surprising to walk in the streets and listen to music in the festive periods and in summer. Today, I got a break from work and went with my family to the main piazza of the town, where a group was singing various songs that contested the Sanremo Festival in the past.
The time came for “Signor Tenente” by Giorgio Faletti (1994), a song that was acclaimed by the critic and arrived second in the competition. A song that is musically flat, with a simple lyric, spoken rather than sung. A song that I had forgotten, but that is linked to an event I will never forget and changed me and many others in Italy, even very far from where it had happened.
In 1992, the prosecutor Giovanni Falcone was killed together with his wife Francesca Morvillo and three police officers in his security detail, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani, when ‘Cosa Nostra’ blasted a segment of a motorway to kill his most feared enemy. Two months later, his friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino was killed with five police officers, Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi , Vincenzo Li Muli and Claudio Traina, by a car bomb while visiting his mother. Sanremo is a sea away from Sicily but in that tragic year we all felt Sicilians, raged against organized crime, close to the prosecutors, judges and the police forces – left alone by a political system that was about to be decimated by corruption scandals and that was in disarray.
“Signor Tenente” narrates that period from the point of view of the police (specifically Carabinieri) who, poorly paid and often in danger, do their duty while bombs kill.
These events might be difficult to understand outside Italy, or perhaps by the generation after mine. However, I wished to share with you, my friends, the feeling of pride I felt when, after a rendition of “Signor Tenente” finished, the square burst in a heart-felt applause, the warmest of the evening.
This is just a reminder that, in any country, most people are honest and good. There is time to criticize any authority, but there is also time to simply just thank, the police forces, the prosecutors, the justice system, and the people that in Italy and anywhere in the world fight injustice at great personal danger.
