Pietro Grasso
Ed. Feltrinelli
pp. 240
"Dear Paul, when I think of you, I often ask myself: how long are you fifty-seven days? How much life can you stay in it? How many things have you been able to understand, to do, to prepare and arrange in those few weeks that separate the 23 May from the 19 July 1992?".
The book ends with the letter to Paolo BorsellinoStories of blood, friends and ghosts"By Pietro Grasso. An intense and exciting, precise and detailed book; a book of memories related to one of the most cruel phenomena in Italian history: that of the mafia. As the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella writes in the preface: "Pietro Grasso is, together, a protagonist and a direct witness. Twenty-five years after the attacks on the Falcone and Borsellino judges, the new book of the Senate president not only offers new details, stories, episodes but allows us to relive a troubled and relevant season in our republican history. A season linked to the criminal, invasive and fatal presence of the mafia. Pietro Grasso is a profound connoisseur of the Mafia phenomenon, he has fought it closely in the various and important positions through which he has developed his life as a magistrate".
And it is through the memories of Pietro Grasso that we retrace the story of the Maxi Processo Process, the faces of the mafia, from Totò Riina to Bernardo Provenzano, whose capture is told in a meticulous and pressing manner; the description of the repentants or collaborators of justice, such as Tommaso Buscetta and Gaspare Spatuzza. Memories that leave room for emotions, still alive and intense, when the mind leads to the symbols of the fight against the mafia and civil commitment: from Piersanti Mattarella to Boris Giuliano, from Rocco Chinnici to Pio La Torre, from don Pino Puglisi to Rosario Livatino to the general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.
But there are also the glue: Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Judges, but first of all friends, as Grasso himself wrote in the opening letter of the novel:Dear John, writing to you is not easy, putting order in the many thoughts and innumerable things I have to tell you ... in these twenty-five years there has not been a day when he has not spoken to you, in which he has not asked you for advice, where has told an interlocutor an anecdote or an episode about you ... The truth is that I miss you very much. Before being Falcone, the myth, the symbol, for me you were above all Giovanni, at first the colleague, then with the passing of the days and the deepening of our relationship, especially the friend".
A book to read, useful for those like me who are part of a generation that the massacres remember them well and that still has in their eyes those TV images of sadness and anger. A book dedicated to the new generations so that they can know a page of Italian history that although not yet closed, has seen our society change. Because as Falcone loved to say: "the mafia is not invincible at all. It is a human fact and like all human facts it has a beginning and it will have an end".
Anita Fiaschetti
