Si starts writing at 7.30pm, when the order arrives.
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Crazy, yes: it stays yellow.
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For it is useless to go look for Vincenzo De Luca on Facebook. Not a theater evening. The governor does not comment directly on how he likes to do: with a glassy look, a trembling, cutting voice. Excessive and visionary, sinister and intimidating. So within a magnetic and tragic situationism, to be beyond Maurizio Crozza, beyond any parody.
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Governor De Luca avoids putting on a show because he is an old man from the stage, from a rally. And he understands that it is better to keep quiet tonight.
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He knows what we all know.
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From the emergency room of the Cardarelli hospital in Naples, here are still images that not even in Baghdad, in those days. The mayors of Caserta urge the sending of the army. The regional union of family doctors is calling for a total lockdown. He asks that Campania become red.
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But also Vincenzo De Luca would have wanted it red. Think local. Let’s go back to two weeks ago.
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Suddenly, the man who managed to keep the first wave of Covid-19 out of his territories – it will never be understood whether for real organizational merits or for a pure and benevolent whim of the virus – finds himself under siege, with the impetuous spread of infections and a health system that has suffered collapse. So calls for urgent and extreme measures. He screams, threatens, invokes.
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De Luca senses the danger.
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He is physically afraid (after all, he’s 71 years old).
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He who gloats when someone still calls him with the old sheriff’s nickname. He who has the flamethrower as his favorite metaphor. He escapes.
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He leaves his office in the building in via Santa Lucia, in Naples, the seat of the Campania Region, and takes refuge in Salerno, his city, in the premises of the Civil Engineers.
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On the evening of October 23 in the living room of the house, a few hours ago he blessed the curfew imposed by Prime Minister Conte. He’s checking on Facebook – consider that like many powerful of an almost feminine vanity – how many likes he got his traditional Friday show. Then the cell phone rings. They call from the prefecture of Naples. The city has risen. The waiters of the pizzerias forced to close at 6 pm together with the Napoli ultrs, with common criminals. Urban warfare on the Lungomare Caracciolo, in Piazza Municipio. Molotov cocktails, overturned bins, the wounded go to the emergency room of Cutugno for treatment but find there – outside, in the open, under the yellow street lamps – the line of Covid patients.
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But it’s not so much, or not only, the clashes that worry him.
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De Luca thinks as a politician. The population has just confirmed him – in some provinces the numbers have been exciting – at the helm of the Region. With all that follows, and that he likes: Campania managed as if it were a Grand Duchy, mixing the dialect with Cicero, picturesque, python-like, brilliant craftsman of oratory studied by a gray Communist leader and then refined over the years that led him to take Salerno, mayor with special effects, batons – Wonderful object of persuasion – and water fountains in the squares, called for this not only Sheriff, but at a certain point also O ‘Faraone, while he does not stop scoffing, defining himself only a Gobettian liberal.
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De Luca likes it like this. And so he wants to continue to please. So, suddenly, he brakes. If Campania is to turn red, let the order come from Palazzo Chigi.
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At this point, a disconcerting saraband of data is unleashed. Until 19 October, there are 113 places available in intensive care; then, overnight, they become 227 and, since last Friday, even 590. Campania is designated yellow, but the inspectors of the Ministry of Health leave. The inspections of the Nas carabinieri also start. Luigi de Magistris – for a long time mainly committed to being a former guest magistrate a Not the Arena by Massimo Giletti – sees the pit of Neapolitans without a mask, remembers being the mayor of Naples, and reopens hostilities with De Luca. So we’re going to crash. De Luca: Some imbecile administrators go around talking badly about Naples and Campania. And he adds, gritting his teeth: Only the envious want Campania from yellow to red.
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The governor decides that the time has come, he now feels mature and then as an amateur acting on Facebook ends up in the theater of the absurd, between Eugne Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, and stages his masterpiece: De Luca attacking De Luca.
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He wants Campania red and he also wants yellow.
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Maybe, who knows, who can say.
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A complicated moment for us political reporters
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November 10, 2020 (change November 10, 2020 | 23:42)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
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