I’ll tell you about Scalfari’s sung masses in Repubblica
The editorial meetings at the Scalfari Republic recalled by Attilio Bolzoni in Domani Quotidiano
We were all perched on the drawers of the central office, wedged one to the other like on the stands of an arena which was then the very long table where Sandro Viola and Miriam Mafai were around, there was Giampaolo Pansa, there were Alberto Jacoviello and Mario Pirani, there was Nello Ajello, there was Bernardo Valli, there was Roselina Balbi, there was Enzo Forcella and Antonio Gambino. Occasionally Giorgio Bocca also came down from Milan.
Many of us were not yet 25 years old, but we all had the right to enter and speak at the morning meeting, the director's “sung mass”. He entered between 10.30 and 11 with a yellow post it in his hand, on one side a list of names and on the other a "viva" or a "down", the good articles and mediocre articles published in the newspaper. In trembling expectation of his judgment in front of that excellent audience, we held our breath.
Sometimes, it happened that Scalfari extended our agony with a phone call. To the president of the Republic Sandro Pertini, to the secretary of the Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer or to that of the Christian Democrats Ciriaco De Mita. He pushed the speakerphone button and talked to them, we heard questions, answers, jokes, some outburst. With eyes wide open and mouth open then we listened to those others around the table, the "sacred monsters", the big names debating the world until it was his turn. And the room fell silent.
Always in the same position, on the right the deputy director Gianni Rocca ("who held Scalfari on his shoulders", recall the founders to exalt the role that Gianni had played in the adventure), on his left the very young Mauro Bene who for the director was like a son.
And in front of the old Franco Magagnini, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, a profession learned on the road, a sensational nose for the news, a bloodthirsty and big-hearted Livornese, a "talking" editor-in-chief as in the following years they were rarely found in the newspapers, editor-in-chief in the literal sense of the term, head of the editorial team and its editors, bearer of their aspirations and their complaints.
He was the only one who dared some criticism of Scalfari. It didn't happen often, but it did. For us, the newcomers, it was an electric shock, a blow. Because Scalfari was not only the director, he was also much more. His genius enchanted us.
I can remember it as I saw it, from a very particular point of observation, correspondent of Repubblica from Sicily, physically distant but close to the heart of the newspaper for the subject I dealt with, the mafia, a topic that has had an important space since from the first issue, January 14, 1976. A cut in the center of the page, title on three columns, “Antimafia, a secret document”, article with double signature, Bruno Corbi and Roberto Chiodi.
I can tell it for how I grew up in that journalistic community, for how Scalfari gave soul to paper and to us a fabulous opportunity that cannot always come in life.
We were at the turn of the seventies and eighties and, if until a few seasons earlier, the director "still did not hear his audience", finally the miracle was repeating itself every morning at the newsstands.
The major investigations into the student movement and the Red Brigades , the kidnapping of Aldo Moro with the "line of firmness" held by the newspaper against any negotiation for his release, the discovery of the P2 lodge and the direct competitor – Corriere della Sera – hit mortally from the scandal of Licio Gelli's Freemasonry which had infiltrated its highest levels.
Republic had become Republic. A mixture of the greats of Italian journalism and a group of novice reporters with the passion and the extraordinary fortune of being there in the middle, free, very free to rummage around in every corner of Italy.
We were already aware of this privilege at the time but, as things went on, forty years later we would have understood better, forty years later we would have understood everything about the good fortune that destiny had reserved for us.
Never an oblique speech for a news apparently too pushed or that could irritate someone, never a censorship, not even an annoying pressure. But there was also the counterpart, the more uncomfortable side, the severe or very severe reproaches that were always delivered with a letter. For the approximation, the superficiality of a piece, the carelessness in the writing, for an incomplete information that ended hastily on the page.
In the year of the newspaper's foundation, 1976, I wasn't there yet, I had just started to be a reporter at the Ora di Palermo. But the old friends of Repubblica have always told me about the very first steps of Repubblica. And what the then aspiring journalists called "the rotor".
There were the columnists, the commentators, the investigators and then guys like Luca Villoresi, Carlo Rivolta, Lucio Caracciolo and Mauro Bene himself.
The first of them who arrived at the editorial office would sling on the only free typewriter and spread out his article, the others waited trembling for the turn, one after the other they rotated in a large room, it was the "rotor" of Piazza Indipendenza.
Fresh, modern, restless and never bald, it was Eugenio Scalfari's newspaper, conceived with the publisher Carlo Caracciolo with whom the editor had a common vision of Italy that had to shake off dust and rhetoric. In culture and politics, in economics and customs. The Italy of change. For us kids, because we were kids, it was like living in a dream. Fatigue and desire to see far beyond.
Sweat and that ink-stained paper that could affect something or someone every day, modify, transform, give a shot to a country that seemed archaic to us even in the way of doing journalism.
I published my first article in Repubblica on July 22, 1979, the day before in Palermo they had killed the head of the mobile squad Boris Giuliano. I would have written from Sicily, and always for the Republic, for almost another 25 years before moving to Rome.
Every now and then I received a telegram from the director, yes, a telegram: Scalfari sent telegrams to Italian correspondents and to envoys around the world. «Beautiful piece Eugenio». The phone calls were of a different tone.
One evening, it was 1983 or 1984, one of his secretaries handed me the director. The hour was unusual, the newspaper was closing. I was anxious, the day before I had written an article perhaps a little too “Sicilian” about what was happening around me, I was down there and I was living the terrifying Palermo with anguish and pain.
The editor was hasty: "I didn't like your article yesterday, there was too much heart and little reason." Scalfari was communicating to me his doubts about the correspondence from Sicily of 24 hours earlier, which however he had put on the page even though he did not coexist with the layout or the contents.
It was probably one of the most significant days of my professional life. That word comes back again: luck. But how lucky was that journalistic generation that met Eugenio Scalfari?
In editorial offices it is customary to speak with everyone. And in Repubblica everyone spoke to Scalfari, even some messenger, even some teletypewriter or dimafonist (at the time the agencies arrived on teletypewriters, the pieces that the envoys and correspondents "dictated" were recorded by the templates who then transcribed them and passed them in editorial board). But I have never succeeded.
Always from you, right up to the end. In one of his increasingly haggard visits to the newspaper, I met the editor accompanied by Dario, once his driver and then an affectionate shadow. We said goodbye and he asked me why "I stubbornly continued to call him Lei". With a smile he answered himself: "Maybe because you want to put distance between you and me." I smiled at him too: "Dear manager, I simply have a sense of proportion."
(Extract from an article published in Domani Quotidiano, the full version of can be read here )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-le-messe-cantate-di-scalfari-a-repubblica/ on Sat, 16 Jul 2022 06:18:51 +0000.