Matteo Messina Denaro: photos from 2006 in Verona and notebooks for his daughter. The boss’s secret ‘Diary’ in a book

Thirteen years of Matteo Messina Denaro’s inaction told by himself, in two notebooks bound and embellished with photos of reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, intended to ‘talk’ remotely with his daughter Lorenza Alagna, who that criminal mafia boss father did not have never wanted to meet, except when his end was now imminent, in prison, after his capture. The journey into the ‘memories’ of Matteo Messina Denaro – as anticipated by La Repubblica – is told by the journalist Lirio Abbateformer director of L’Espresso and editorialist for Repubblica, in a book that will be released on 21 January by Rizzoli, and which explores the years from 2003 to 2016 in the life of the mafia boss who collected his intimate thoughts, often with reference to his relationships with the women, also accompanying them with his photographs. Like the shots that portray him in 2006 in front of the Verona Arena in an article published by the newspaper in which Abbate himself illustrates the content of his latest work, ‘I Diari del boss. Words, secrets and omissions by Matteo Messina Denaro’. It is the author himself who points out the manipulative tone of these ‘memoirs’ intended for his daughter who for 27 years has always refused to meet her ‘godfather’ and narcissistic father. «Only I could tell her the truth about my life, naked and raw as it was, because only I know my life, and not the others who have always abused talking about me, and about me. I thought I owed it to him”, writes Messina Denaro who will be arrested in Palermo on 16 January 2023 and will die a few months later, on 25 September 2023.