«Peppino Impastato is truly the figure of a martyr, a hero of our time who fights for a good cause even at the cost of putting his life at risk. His was a mafia family, his father was a mafia member and his uncle was a clan leader. Having grown up in this context, however, he managed to rebel. He had a political commitment and denounced every day from the microphones of his radio the suffocating presence of Cosa Nostra in his country, he who had the mafia at home. He was a hero because he knew perfectly well that sooner or later he would pay.” Words with which the director of the Gazzetta del Sud, Nino Rizzo Nervo, remembers Peppino Impastato, a life against the mafia, on the anniversary of his birth, 5 January 1948.
It is the anniversary that will open the week from tomorrow to 11 January in which Rizzo Nervo will return as a columnist to «Il giorno e la Storia», the Rai Cultura program signed by Giovanni Paolo Fontana, broadcast every day at 00.10 and in repeat at 8.30, 11.30, 14.00 and 20.10 on Rai Storia.
After the memory of Impastato, on Tuesday 6th our thoughts will go to another victim of the mafia, the president of the Sicily Region Piersanti Mattarella, killed in Palermo in 1980. Wednesday 7th will be the date on which, in 2015 in Paris, two hooded men armed with Kalashnikovs broke into the editorial office of the satirical periodical “Charlie Hebdo”: 12 people dead and 11 injured. Then the two returned to the street and killed two officers. The attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda.
Thursday 8 Rizzo Nervo will remember Leonardo Sciascia, born in 1921 in Racalmuto, Sicily. Author of books such as «Il giorno della civetta» and «To each his own», in 1979 he was elected deputy on the radical lists and entered the commission of inquiry into the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. A “technological” birthday will be the protagonist of the anniversary of Friday the 9th: in 2007 Steve Jobs presented the first smartphone that combined three devices, an iPod, for listening to music, a telephone and a PDA for surfing the internet. Saturday the 10th is the day on which, in 1859 in Turin, Vittorio Emanuele II gave the opening speech of the Piedmontese parliament with those words – “We are not insensitive to the cry of pain that rises towards us from many parts of Italy” – which will mark the beginning of the Second War of Independence.
The week of the director of the Gazzetta del Sud will end on Sunday 11th by remembering the day on which, in 1944 in Verona, Galeazzo Ciano and other hierarchs were shot on charges of treason, for having voted, in the Grand Council of 25 July 1943, the Grandi agenda which had led to the fall of Mussolini.