How he would celebrate his hundredth birthday Eugenio Scalfari, who passed away on July 14 two years ago, if he had managed to reach the century mark? He would certainly have wanted his family around him, his two daughters, Donata and Enrica, and his nephew Simone. He would have asked his closest friends to celebrate with him, and he would have extended the invitation to his extended family, to his tribe, that of Republicthe journalists and readers of the newspaper he founded in 1976 and directed for twenty years, until he left the helm of the “ship”, as he often defined the newspaper, especially in the early, adventurous years, to Ezio Mauro.
Precisely on the day of his hundredth birthday (he was born in Civitavecchia on 6 April 1924) he would have been happy to know that his families, that of his loved ones and that of the newspaper, which are not two distinct things, met to celebrate him with the words, as he liked, toAuditorium Parco della Musica in Rome.
A collective memory, of a crowd, cheerful, affectionate, brilliant, as events of this type rarely are but as is very fitting for a man like Scalfari. With a show dedicated to him by Stefano Massini, Italy according to Scalfari. Chronicles of the end of the millenniumwhich was sold out – on an afternoon in which Rome was blocked in front of the Roma-Lazio derby – and, immediately before, with the presentation of the volume dedicated to him by his nephew.
For his grandfather, for himself but also for all of us readers of Republic, Simone Viola23 years old, law student in Padua, collected the testimonies of one hundred people who knew him and collected them in a book entitled 100 times Scalfari, published by the Gedi Group; the book begins with his memory of an affectionate and intellectually generous grandfather (one day he said to him: «If I were rich I would give you the facades of the churches». «The facades of the churches cannot be given as gifts. But I carry that phrase with me me», writes Simone) and continues, in sections that range from private to public life, up to the relationship with Pope Francis evoked by Don Vincenzo Paglia.
A century of Scalfari in 100 very special portraits. The book on newsstands
by Sara Scarafia
Moderated by Simonetta Fiori, the director of Republic Maurizio Molinari and then Corrado Augias, Ezio Mauro, Silvana Mazzocchi.
Each with “his” Scalfari in mind, the traits of an acquaintance and a friendship, as well as each of the hundred who participated in the book, and ultimately each of the readers of Repubblica. Because creating a newspaper like Scalfari wanted ours is a collective work of genius, a work that goes beyond the confines of the editorial team to embrace an entire country.
If in fact, as the director mentioned Maurizio Molinari recalling the conversations with him, Scalfari believed in the importance for a director «of taking on the burden of deciding which direction to move in, which themes to give priority to», at the same time it was, in the words of Corrado Augias, a “tribe leader” who with his journalists, but also in dialogue with politics, society and culture, decided every day how to report on Italy and the world. Augias remembers how revolutionary it was Republic conceived in 1976, for the new tabloid format and for the decision to move Culture from the third page to the center of the newspaper, reiterating the idea «that politics could not move forward without a robust cultural formation» and affirming a «median, secular, radical-liberal, inspired by Gramsci and Gobetti”.
[[(gele.Finegil.Image2014v1) Scalfari]]
Ezio Mauro focuses, recalling the “sung mass of Piazza Indipendenza”, as the first meeting of the day was called, on the journalism lesson that Scalfari left: «The meeting was also a report. To mark the points where the target was hit and identify the errors, understand where and how we went wrong.” And while our thoughts turn to two friends and colleagues who recently passed away, Ernesto Assante and Mauro Bene, Silvana Mazzocchi and Simonetta Fiori, long-time correspondents for the newspaper, underline the role that Scalfari attributed to his fellow journalists from the beginning: for the first time there were female authors on the front page on economic and political topics, sectors traditionally considered “masculine”.
The audience, rather than listening, participates: because among those present many are very long-standing friends, from Luigi Zanda to Fabiano Fabiani, many colleagues from the newspaper who also remain linked to the founder by a relationship that is much more than professional. which, Ezio Mauro further notes, «this book could also have been titled Of Friendship». And if in the room there was the idea of a community where different opinions and different sensitivities have been able to coexist and still know how to coexist, helping to understand current events and construct a narrative, outside, already long before Massini’s show, the very long queue was growing of the audience who had booked to attend Italy according to Eugenio.
A queue of over a thousand people of different generations, which goes outside the hall and crosses the entire large courtyard of the Auditorium. Here it is, one thought, Italy according to Eugenio, that intellectually curious, non-ideological and secular Italy, which with a bet, one day in January 1976, Scalfari successfully asked to find himself on these pages every day. To reflect on today and imagine tomorrow.
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– 2024-04-07 18:44:14
