Roberta Gatani, Paolo Borsellino's niece, will tell the story of the fifty-seven days that separated the Capaci massacre from the Via d'Amelio massacre, and of her uncle Paolo's dream of love, realized with the Casa di Paolo for the children of the Kalsa neighborhood of Palermo.
Iod editions supports the dream of love of Paolo Borsellino, realized by Salvatore Borsellino and Roberta Gatani with “La Casa di Paolo”, which became reality on July 17, 2015, which came to life in the premises of the former “Farmacia Borsellino”, in Palermo in via Della Vetriera n. 57. A unique, special, emotional place, where memory is made with a smile and with a lot of dignity, for the benefit of the younger generations, and not only.
Salvatore Borsellino
Hi Roberta, I'm reading your book. It's beautiful. Thank you for making me cry, for being able to enter my dream, making it even more beautiful than I had ever imagined, because you also put your motherly love into it. Thank you for bringing my sister Adele back with you. Thank you for writing about Paolo not as others have written him, but as the one who was first and foremost your uncle, first and foremost my brother. We absolutely must publish this book, let everyone read it, that's how Paolo will never die, and it will also be thanks to you and your words. I love you, Robi.
Programme
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Di Stefano Hall, Palace of Arts Naples
Via dei Mille, 60
Laura Bercioux, journalist for The Voice of New York
Franco Roberti, former National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor
Nino Daniele, President of the Amato Lamberti Award
Salvatore Cuoci, President of the Don Peppe Diana Committee
Don Franco Esposito, Prison Pastoral of the Church of Naples
Pasquale Testa, Iod editions
Luciana Esposito, journalist Napolitan.it
Francesco Dandolo, Community of Sant'Egidio-University Federico II
Gianlivio Fasciano, writer
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Roberta Gatani, author
Elena Scala, teacher at the Cicciano High School
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Roberta Gatani will visit the Hall of Memory and Mehari by Giancarlo Siani
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ANPI Naples
Don Peppe Diana Committee
Community of Sant'Egidio Naples
Children in the family non-profit organization
Campania Red Diaries Group "Paolo Borsellino"
Red Diaries Movement Giancarlo Siani Group of Torre Annunziata
Amato Lamberti Award
Prison ministry of the Church of Naples
Free Evangelical Christian Church of Casalnuovo di Napoli
Forever News
Napolitan.it
Courts 138
United Colors of Naples
The People's House - Pomigliano
BOOK CONTENTS
Fifty-seven days separate the Capaci massacre from the Via d'Amelio massacre. A time in which much could have been done by the institutions to protect Paolo Borsellino, but none of that much was done.
In this book, Roberta Gatani, Paolo Borsellino's niece, in a sort of countdown, retraces every single day that passed between May 23 and July 19, 1992, a very busy time span for the Judge who, knowing that his hours were numbered, without ever thinking of escaping his destiny, put all his strength and will into shedding light on the Capaci massacre, noting down every detail of that investigation in his red diary.
Roberta Gatani also tells us about Paolo's fragility, torn apart in those days by grief over the death of his close friend Giovanni Falcone and worried about the fate of his family and the boys in his escort.
The story of Paolo as a child on the streets of Kalsa together with his brother Salvatore, that of family memories and the desire to carve out spaces of freedom and normality give us a human portrait that does even more justice to the sacrifice made in the name of Truth.
In parallel to this story runs the narration of everyday life at Casa di Paolo, an association founded in 2015 by Salvatore Borsellino, directed by Roberta Gatani, with headquarters in the old family pharmacy in via Vetriera, in the heart of Kalsa, a place where Paolo's memory lives on today through the work of volunteers who fight, with all their strength, to offer hospitality, affection, education and a better future to the young people of the neighborhood. A place that has become a fundamental stop for anyone who goes to visit Palermo. A place where love has performed the miracle of bringing back to run the hands of a time broken by criminal violence.
BIOGRAPHY
Roberta Gatani was born in Palermo. She is the daughter of Adele, Paolo Borsellino's older sister.
She graduated in Educational Sciences but gave up teaching to dedicate all her commitment and passion to the memory of the Judge and to the fight to bring him justice.
Since 2016, he has been responsible for Casa di Paolo, a project aimed at providing alternatives to the children and young people of Kalsa, the neighborhood where Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone were born, today at great risk.
PAUL'S HOUSE
It is the project of Salvatore, Paolo Borsellino's brother, born from the desire to bring the Judge back to the neighborhood where he was born and to which he remained strongly attached throughout his life. It was inaugurated on July 17, 2015 in the premises of the historic family pharmacy and since then it has been open free of charge to everyone, especially to children and young people who live in situations of economic hardship, emotional and relational deprivation and cultural disadvantage, trying to give them the opportunity to imagine a different future and the tools necessary to achieve it.
Paolo's House lives solely thanks to the commitment of volunteers and private donations.
citizens.
www.19luglio1992.com/
casadipaolo.pa@gmail.com
FROM THE PREFACE BY SALVATORE BORSELLINO
The book alternates, in retracing those terrible fifty-seven days - during which Paolo no longer cuddled his children to get them used to his absence; he asked his spiritual father to go and confess him to the Prosecutor's Office because "he had to be ready"; he confided to his wife Agnese that he had learned that General Subranni was punciutu, and he vomited when he remembered it -, the description of those moments lived through the eyes of a niece who was just a girl at the time, with the description of the days at Paolo's House through the eyes of that girl who is now a mother, together with the volunteers and children who come to what was once our family's pharmacy to find Paolo's love. Likewise, in these pages the desperation, discouragement and loneliness of those days alternate with the hope of today and, thus, this volume, rather than accompanying him to his tragic end, slowly accompanies him to where his love lives today and will continue to live.
ROBERTA GATANI
On July 19, 1992, I was eighteen. I was a normal girl, like many others. Indeed, I was definitely a person who paid little attention to what was happening around me, superficial, perhaps. Since my father had died, ten years earlier, everyone around me had tried to make me feel good, pampering me and spoiling me, too. My older brothers, my mother and you too, uncle, who became my point of reference, my support. […] That day, therefore, I had accepted an invitation on a boat, I who have always suffered from seasickness. Anything to avoid being with my mother and always hearing the same conversations. And so we left Cala early in the morning and I saw Palermo moving further and further away and becoming smaller and smaller together with my thoughts, with all my worries. And we spent the whole day out at sea. Without a radio on. Without any contact with the mainland.
A day without thinking about anything. Sun and swimming. We return to port late in the evening, and I discover that you are dead. I discover it after seeing that no one has come to pick me up. I discover it after I started calling from the phone booth but no one answered, neither at home nor at my brothers' stables. I discover it from my boyfriend, that you are dead. The receiver falls from my hands and I stagger.
A man comes up to me, the only living soul passing by, after endless minutes in which the usually crowded street has remained deserted. I look at him and ask what happened in Palermo, where the chaos, the traffic, the life has gone. I discover that you're dead. And my world collapses. Everything blurs, and the memories from that moment are only fragments of pain that, when they resurface, still tear my heart apart...
CRONISTI SCALZI SERIES DEDICATED TO GIANCARLO SIANI | EDITOR'S NOTE
21 titles have been published in the Cronisti Scalzi series in just two years since its birth.
Cronisti Scalzi is the Iod editions series dedicated to the memory of Giancarlo Siani and has the ambition to collect the stories, narrations and tales of young reporters from the suburbs, teachers, educators, writers and relatives of innocent victims of the mafia, who resist a journalism that is increasingly adapting to the conformism of dominant thought and the powerful.
We are convinced that today more than ever we need a new generation of storytellers, in the broadest sense, who know how to live, with their minds and hearts, the neighborhoods, alleys and squares of the cities, to passionately tell the stories and faces of the people who every day work hard to build a clear and conscious alternative to social degradation, to the excessive power of the mafia and corruption.
We want to give space, together with authoritative voices of investigative journalism, to women and men who continue to be present on site, barefoot, and who preserve the memory, style and passion of Giancarlo Siani, the precarious journalist, killed by the Camorra on the evening of 23 September 1985, and defined by Erri De Luca as "The barefoot reporter".
"Giancarlo was a barefoot journalist; he didn't wait for news to report it, but sought out the bloody mechanism that produced it."
EDITORIAL TEAM
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