I saw those three letters – an r, an a and an i – early on, in photos, as a child. I don’t remember the moment my mother told me that my father had died. I knew it, I understood it, but I don’t remember how or when. But I remember him showing me pictures of him. He was at the Tour de France for his job as a radio commentator, when cycling was dust and effort, and he had a suit on, like a worker. On that uniform, which I rightly imagined to be beige, there was only one writing, at heart level: Rai. I imagined him in that suit, while on the radio microphone he announced Bartali’s victory in the Tour, while he told Italians about the funeral of the great Turin, while he planned “La Domenica Sport”, which was broadcast on the first day of broadcasts, seventy years does.
As Aldo Grasso recalled in his article, Vittorio Veltroni was the first news director. They called him in 1953 after, in the experimental broadcasts, someone had broadcast a film about Stalin’s funeral which however had a small flaw: Stalin could be seen in the foreground carrying a coffin on his shoulders which intuitively should not have contained him. He was 34 years old when he was appointed. At 28 they called him to manage the radio news editorial team. In those years, the first post-war years, a team was formed composed of Nando Martellini, Lello Bersani, Sergio Zavoli, Enrico Ameri, Pia Moretti, Aldo Salvo, Paolo Rosi, Massimo Rendina, Tito Stagno… and then Ettore Scola, Alberto Sordi, Ugo Gregoretti. They gave life, with Zavattini, to radio neorealism translated into documentaries, and broadcast the surreal comedy of Alberto Sordi’s Teatrino with Mario Pio and Count Claro.
In 1951, my father invented the Chain of Solidarity, a progenitor of Telethon, interrupting radio broadcasts to announce that the town would mobilize in a generosity competition to actively support the flooded Polesine. It was an avalanche of solidarity, wonderful in that poor and semi-destroyed Italy. Sordi will give an account of this in his own way, in a memorable scene from one of his funniest films, It Happened at the Penitentiary, where he is arrested, drunk, on charges of having cooperated in the theft of bolts of fabric. The next day, when questioned, he learns that it is the deputy who is asking him the questions and insists that the commissioner be called instead. In the end, as a demonstration that he cannot be accused of anything, he shows his empty hand, claps the other on it and says, with a wild look: «Do you want to know why I’m innocent? Here it is. I gave my coat to Polesine”.
In those years, my father had a boy who lived in America come to Rome and his name was Michael Bongiorno. He gave him a column called “Arrivals and Departures”, and then convinced him to give himself a simpler name, Mike, and try his hand at the quiz. When my father died at the age of 37 from fulminant leukemia, my mother Ivanka was hired in his place with the title of simple official. For me, Rai thus became a large building on Via Del Babuino, where today there is the Hotel de Russie, and then that on Viale Mazzini, whose birth we experienced as a family and where she worked until her retirement.
My first childhood memory is always linked to Rai. It’s a summer day in 1960, with the windows of the living room open onto a wonderful Roman evening. A man wearing anachronistic sunglasses takes a bend while a flight of pigeons clutters the television screen. It was a CGE, one of those that were turned on with the transformer. And then the common experience of the television and Rai generation, which in reality were the same thing: the Musichiere, Maestro Manzi, Cutolo’s post office, Giovanna the grandmother of the Black Corsair, Father Mariano with his beard and his reassuring smile, going to bed after Carosello, The adventures of the tow team, Davide Copperfield, Il Giornalino by Gian Burrasca with Rita Pavone directed by Lina Wertmuller and set to music by Nino Rota, Alta Pressione, Campanile Sera, Studio Uno and its Library with the Cetra Quartet, Bonanza and Perry Mason, Doctor Kildare and Zorro with Sergeant Garcia, the Tuesday film, the birth of the second channel, the Trial at the stage by Sergio Zavoli…
Around 1968, Rai, Bernabei’s much-maligned Rai, was TV7, the 1.30 pm news program created by Fabiano Fabiani and hosted by Piero Angela or Andrea Barbato. On the radio there was the memorable Per voi youth by Arbore and, for music, Bandiera giallo by Gianni Boncompagni. Constantly suspended between its task as an official voice, its institutional role and its natural drive to interpret the new that was advancing in society, Rai, for me, was fundamental in Italian modernization, in the growth of knowledge and critical sense , even in the secularization of the country. Great civil achievements, such as divorce and abortion, would not have been possible without the cultural discourse that Rai made, with courage, throughout the part of the twentieth century that it occupied.
When I review the images that the news operators shot on the morning in which my father’s coffin came out of the front door of the house, on a hot sunny day in July 1956, and I scroll through them, going back and forth in the vision, I find myself, among the participants in that melancholy procession, many faces of the future protagonists of the history of Rai. They were kids then, they had suffered, they were looking for the light after the darkness of the tunnel. I don’t know if they wanted to change the world, but they certainly wanted to change the way of telling it. And I think they succeeded.
2024-01-02 22:42:50
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