Pietro Bartolo, Lidia Tilotta
Ed. Mondadori
pp. 139
Pietro Bartolo became famous on the evening of 20 February 2016 when in Berlin the film Fuocoammare by Gianfranco Rosi won the Golden Bear. During the awards ceremony, Meryl Streep said: "This is an urgent, visionary, necessary film". Since that night we have all come to know of a doctor who in Lampedusa from 1991 deals with migrants, welcoming them, caring for them and listening to them.
The story of Pietro Bartolo, man, doctor, husband, first son and then father, unfolds in an exciting and intense book: "Tears of salt”, Written together with the Tgr journalist, Lidia Tilotta. A strong book, a continuum between past and present, between stories of migrants and memories of a past life. A unique setting, that of Lampedusa, the island symbol of what has been called the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time. A fascinating and welcoming island, strong and courageous like its inhabitants, those fishermen who do not escape the law of the sea because: "there is something that is perhaps not understandable if you are not born on an island far from every land like us: leaving someone, whoever it is, at the mercy of the waves is not allowed, it is not even thinkable".
The law of the sea: that sea that daily tests thousands of people who risk their lives to cross it in search of a better future. People who escape from war and poverty and whose stories intertwine with that of Pietro Bartolo, always present at the Molo Favaloro, at any time of day or night, ready to save them. Stories of women and men, often victims of violence and abuse. Stories of children, some of them very young, who most often arrive on the island alone. But the important thing is to get alive and hope for a different future. The chronicle is full of people who have died in the sea, but no one like Pietro Bartolo really knows what it means to die at sea and have the task of restoring dignity to an offended, torn and consummate body.
A raw book, but I advise everyone to read to understand what really happened and is happening in Lampedusa, and to share that sense of anger and helplessness that one feels, and that I believe Doctor Bartolo feels, in front of so much suffering and inhuman condition. Like all medals, however, there is always a positive and beautiful side and we also find it in "Tears of salt”, In the stories of births or in those with happy endings. I close with a passage from the book that touched me, a message of hope from the little ones to their peers: "Dear children, you have left your countries to seek a different world in Europe, a better world. It is up to us young people to change this world by following the men and women who know how to give themselves with coherence and generosity".
Anita Fiaschetti
