Diary of an impossible application

I was born 71 years ago in the very southernmost tip of the peninsula, in Reggio Calabria. I have lived in Rome for 55 years, never ceasing to travel around and report on the South as a seasoned reporter, relying on the soles of my shoes and a notebook, just as Valentino Parlato taught me when I began my traineeship at Il Manifesto. I had a notebook and good shoes, but no driving licence, which I never got. I’ve travelled the South in every possible way: given a lift by colleagues (back then the newspaper had branches all over Italy), by train, by bus. I’ve reported on Italo Falcomatà’s Reggio Calabria and the Locride region, on Palermo during the ‘Primavera’ and the Mafia massacres, on Bari with its ‘cavallini’ and the child drug dealers.

I’d like to tell you about a strange journey with a Pirandellian flavour that took me to Reggio Calabria, where a group of left-wing rebels from Reggio had the bold idea of putting my name forward as a candidate for the broad coalition in the by-election for the Chamber of Deputies constituency, which is due to take place on 27 September.

The first meeting is with an old friend who knows everything about the PD, accompanied by another person. Before the official meetings, I want to understand – as a veteran reporter – what is going on within that party, which will have the final say on my potential candidacy, put forward by a group of intellectuals, professionals, trade unionists and people of the utmost prestige, but with absolutely no power.

I know the Reggio party very well. I was a friend of Italo Falcomatà, and I helped his son Giuseppe in his first – and successful – mayoral election campaign in 2014. Two weeks after his election, I returned to Rome, having been ousted from the small inner circle (which later proved to be tragic) that surrounded him.

I have been following his work from a distance, offering him some advice when asked, and providing some (free) consultancy on cultural projects about which I have since heard nothing more.

2022 general election: Francesco Cannizzaro, of Forza Italia, wins a seat; 2025 regional election: Roberto Occhiuto, of Forza Italia, becomes president; 2026 local election: Francesco Cannizzaro is elected mayor with 65 per cent of the vote. Second-round elections for the metropolitan city council in recent weeks: victory for the centre-right. This is the most humiliating result, because many centre-left mayors have switched sides to join Francesco Cannizzaro’s Forza Italia – the popular mayor whose compulsory resignation as an MP paves the way for the next contest, in which I might be standing.

Francesco Cannizzaro is a real character! With his broad Aspromonte face, well-built, smiling, approachable and down-to-earth. I know The Ciccio’s Magic World well: he was born in the village where my mother’s family comes from, Santo Stefano D’Aspromonte, where my maternal grandfather, Carmelo, was the leading coal merchant. I was born in Reggio, but every August and September the family would move to Mannoli, a hamlet of Santo Stefano. I used to spend time with Francesco’s dad, with whom I’d play football (he was brilliant, had great footwork; I didn’t, but I had agility and speed), and his mum. The mayor at the time was a chubby little boy who used to run about the village. So, when I think of him, I do so with respect for a life characterised by hard work.

Today, Reggio is a city wrapped in Ciccio’s cotton wool; it reveres him and even pampers him, partly because the shifting allegiances between left and right – and vice versa – in this city are an age-old and ingrained custom, just like the barrages of judicial mudslinging. This dangerous complacency causes far too many to forget that within Reggio lies the fascist soul of Ciccio Franco, who transformed a popular uprising (which, whilst it had many justifications that I cannot adequately address here for reasons of space) into a fascist terrorist attack on Italian democracy. And General Vannacci presents himself here as the ideological heir to ‘Boia Chi Molla’.

This is what I’m thinking about as I savour a plate of spaghetti cu sugu da siccia (with squid ink sauce), which reminds me of my mother’s cooking. I put the question that’s been nagging at me to those I’m speaking to: the PD has governed this city and region for an entire political cycle; it has done some good things – for example, bringing running water to every home in Reggio, and completing the Gallico-Gambarie road, which has enormous potential for tourism development because in half an hour you can go from the marvellous beaches along the coast to the foothills of the Aspromonte – so why did you lose so disastrously? Why is the city now slumbering in the arms of Ciccio Cannizzaro and risks waking up in the less tender embrace of a new Ciccio Franco? The story they tell me is that of a party which, in the city, is divided into opposing factions, stripped of any forum for democratic debate, and debased in its identity, because each faction has cross-party alliances with factions from the opposing political camp. A place where transparency has been abolished and deception, double-dealing and triple-crossing are the norm. Proof of what I’m saying is that the two delightful people I spoke to are begging me, for God’s sake, to keep our meeting a secret. I’ve decided that the only weapon I have is to turn this story into a public diary.

The day after this meeting, I called the official representative of the PD. I know he is aware of my candidacy, and I know that the elections have been scheduled for 27–28 September. Here is my self-recording:

“Hello, I am Carmine. How are you? I understand you have read about this idea of mine to stand as a candidate, and I would like to know what you think, because I am available – but only if you are all in agreement – and I certainly do not wish to stand in the way of another candidate if you already have one.”

“Hi Carmine, but how are we supposed to decide if we don’t even know whether there’s a vote (sounding a bit irritated).”

“I will certainly look into it. However, I must inform you that I currently have no candidates; we will convene a meeting and provide you with an update (tone of someone wishing to dismiss an inconvenience).”

I decide to take at face value the assertion that there are no other candidates and embark on a week of private discussions in which I tell everyone the same thing I told the PD, at both national and local levels. I speak via text message, by telephone or in person with all the national leaders of the broad coalition. Some are in favour of my candidacy; some tell me, ‘Who gives a damn about Reggio? It’s a lost cause anyway’; others tell me they have no objections, but that they obviously need to know what the PD thinks because it is the strongest party in the area. And the PD? It remains silent.

Meanwhile, the story – which I wanted to make public straight away (see Il Foglio of 22 July) – has generated a local media buzz that, frankly, I hadn’t imagined, right up to an interview on the front page of Reggio’s leading daily, La Gazzetta del Sud, written by Piero Gaeta under the headline “Fotia, if I am the candidate, I will win because I will touch the hearts of the people of Reggio”. The headline is somewhat over-the-top but conveys a straightforward idea effectively: between Cannizzaro’s slumber and Vannacci’s nightmare, I offer a democratic and anti-fascist identity, the gentle courage of Italo Falcomatà, the mayor of Reggio’s ‘spring’, who was the target of Mafia attacks, but also of unfounded punitive persecution and betrayals within his own party.

As for me, I am enjoying being pampered by my beloved cousins, alternating between swimming in the Ionian Sea and the cool mountain air of the Aspromonte. Together with my dear childhood friend, Aldo Libri – former secretary of the CGIL trade union in Gioia Tauro, who used to kick the Mafia out of the port there, and who is now secretary of the SUL trade union and a civic activist – we meet some of the people who support me: Ilario Ammendolia, former mayor of Caulonia, a man who enjoys enormous and well-deserved prestige; Gioacchino Criaco, the writer who has made the ‘White Mountain’ – the Aspromonte – a place where truth is restored to the written word.

I am one of many who reject the portrayal of Reggio and Calabria as ‘irredeemable’ and destined to oscillate between resignation and futile revolt. They believe – and I agree with them – that the necessary fight against the ’ndragheta is all too often used as an excuse to keep us subjugated to this narrative of irredeemability.

Those were wonderful days spent in the places of my happy childhood, between adventures in the town, endless summers split between the municipal lido and interminable football matches in Aspromonte. For me back then, the ‘ndrangheta was a sort of tale of something that belonged to shadowy places, not to the dazzling light of the Strait. Then I realised – and wrote about – that even my glittering city had its dark corners, and how.

The very same obscure corners from which this entry originates, in a thick Reggio dialect, tells one of my supporters: “If you love him, tell him to go away. You get it, it’s not for him.”

The rumour came from some remote corner of the Reggio Calabria branch of the PD, which had no candidates and which, according to the official line, was not standing in my way. As I am able to substantiate it, I am reporting it here because everything must be made public.

As I reflect with concern on these words, a news item published by Isabella Marchiolo in Reggio Today warms my heart: Mimmo Lucano, MEP, mayor of Riace, victim of one of the most sensational cases of judicial persecution – an example of unjust justice, treated as badly as, if not worse than, a mafia member – has expressed his support for my candidacy, recalling how I was one of the first and few to defend him in 2022 with a lengthy feature in L’Espresso by Marco Damilano. It is clear that Mimmo knows me well because he sums up my political identity in just a few words: “I consider him to be of the same kind of libertarian left with which I have always identified.”

I will spare you the unnecessary details of recent days. The fact is that, following a series of secret meetings, closed-door discussions and national consultations, the PD is proposing (still in the utmost secrecy) the name of Frank A. Benedetto, born in New York, a cardiologist and head of department at the hospital trust, and a former city councillor who led the PD group in Reggio. This is the name they had in mind from the very beginning, and they are putting him forward as an independent candidate. Some parties in the coalition, however, point out that Mr Frank is not an independent, as his membership of the PD – of which he is a long-standing activist – is well known throughout the city. Key figures within the PD have made it clear that they will never vote for Benedetto. And someone has put my name forward again, but the PD won’t listen to reason and is insisting on Benedetto. As the tone of the discussion becomes more heated, the others say it must be clear that they are only accepting this in the interests of maintaining the national balance, which they do not wish to upset, despite the PD’s ‘stubbornly anti-unification behaviour’.

I officially know nothing about any of this, because nobody rings me to tell me anything. Meanwhile, the ranks of my supporters are expanding to include Rifondazione Comunista, whose secretary, Maurizio Acerbo, has declared his support for my candidacy, meaning that my camp would stretch from Rifondazione to Casa Riformista, via the M5S, with all of them willing to rally behind me. No reply received.

Why is the PD so staunchly opposed to it? I suppose for the very same reason that Mimmo Lucano is in favour of it: I belong to that libertarian left which resents the military-style discipline typical of a party culture with Stalinist roots. A culture which has, however, survived in this enclave, no longer underpinned by a party or an ideology, and thus entrusted to power structures where only the invited are admitted.

Thank goodness, I wasn’t one of them. I don’t care about it and never have, as the great Ettore Petrolini used to say.

As you read this article, someone is, in secret – without any public announcement or explanation, or indeed any private one for that matter – submitting Mr Frank’s candidacy, even though half of his own electorate does not want to vote for him.

After all, could the architects of the last three disastrous defeats possibly have failed to deliver a fourth? It’ll be worthy of a lifetime achievement Oscar.

I am here in Riace, where my friend Mimmo Lucano has called an open town council meeting. Giuseppe Conte is also present, joining via video link.

I am here for Mimmo and to continue my civic commitment, alongside all the people and experiences I have encountered in the local area: I am talking about intelligence, skills, governance practices and original ways of fighting injustice. These are often small communities open to the world, which do not feel like – nor are they – peripheral areas, but central places.

It is places like Riace (beyond the figure of Mimmo) that become symbolic forces capable of evoking positive emotions and inspiring a struggle that is both courageous and gentle.