Andrea Purgatori: A Master Investigative Journalist and Civil Rights Advocate

He armored his last steps with silence. A bad diagnosis foreshadowed the worst and he suddenly closed contact with everyone, strengthened by the embrace of his three children. Thus was his life broken Andrea Purgatory, today a well-known face of La7 with his Atlantis but for almost half a century a race reporter, investigative journalist for Corriere della Sera which he entered very young after the Master of Science in Journalism at Columbia University in New York, film author , movies, documentaries, talk shows. Director, screenwriter, committed as an author on all fronts of the show. Andrea had an obsession: «Looking for the best possible version of the truth».

Andrea Purgatori, fulminating illness and death in hospital. «He had disappeared, he had closed all the phones»

A line of conduct that with time and experience made him a Master, shy and outspoken, hostile to the easy protagonisms of notoriety, always bending over to research the facts as they happened and not as it is convenient to tell them. There was in him an obstinacy that was never ostentatious in the search for evidence, fueled by the conviction that the trade must possess the courage imposed by circumstances even when the subjects are mafia members, terrorists, criminals who can’t stand intrusions. The care of the sources, always kept away from draughts, the strength to toil day and night on the most impervious and perilous roads, a rigor and an ethics that could even make one smile for how temperamental and without nuances it was.

SARCASM

But also the irony tinged at times with sarcasm against clichés and certain stereotypes of the trade, the shattering dark circles caused by an invincible insomnia, the tousled hair as if from an imprudent gust of wind, the cigar, half Tuscan, perhaps extinguished to play with lips and hands and lots of cigarette smoke as an inseparable companion to so much work-related stress. On TV he appeared frowning, even grumpy, almost threatening in the presentations of the episodes of Atlantis, a format that fully reflects his way of doing journalism, with a straight back, with a respectful sense of all ideas as long as they are expendable in the face of facts.

WRITING

Andrea was a sweet and uncomfortable colleague, always on the spot, gifted with a prodigious memory, generous with others and much less with himself. He had a dry, nervous writing, full of references, never pompous or complacent, aimed at hitting the target which is the heart of the news, more often than the scoop: hundreds of articles with his signature are enclosed in the Corriere della Sera collections where he and I have worked opposite each other for twenty years.

GRANITE

The massacre of Ustica with its secrets and mysteries and the granite rubber wall of the military, the Moro case in all its infinite ramifications, the Magliana gang and its complicity all the way up into the Vatican, and then the shocking season of mafia massacres, the assassination of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the network of silences and unspeakable complicity wrapped in the mantle of occult powers: a fan that intertwines with the recent history of our country, interwoven with blood and shivers and complicity to which Andrea Purgatori, a living witness of his time, dedicated the most fruitful and committed part of his career.
The severe and supervised sobriety with which this Italian journalist lived and practiced his profession even contains the risk, when narrating it, of some hyperbole or emphasis induced by the pain of mourning. Because a great journalist has left us, that’s for sure. And in any case, his curriculum vitae, truncated at the age of 70 by a ferocious and hasty disease, bears witness to a red thread of civil commitment that gives this profession, sometimes even mistreated with good reason, a value that becomes an indispensable safeguard of legality.

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2023-07-19 22:58:57
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