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Rating: I met horror as a child. It was almost summer. I remember blue, yellow and warmth. I remember the happiness of finishing school and going on vacation. But something terrible happened. After so many years, I thought it was all over. Instead, a few days ago, I randomly opened a book, lured by that name: Vermicino. A punch to the stomach. And something dark and sad starts to return. Since then, I had heard of it other times, but, perhaps unconsciously, I had avoided, removed, overlooked, obstructed, disinfected, healed. I believed. 29 years have passed. It was 1981. In Italy, it was a mess. A few months earlier, the earthquake in Irpinia claimed three thousand lives. A few days earlier, there had been an attack on the Pope. The P2 scandal was causing the government of Forlani to resign. Licio Gelli had fled. A new government led by Spadolini, the first secular president, was forming. The Red Brigades were striking their last blows with kidnappings. There was talk of a coup. But everything, everything, everything disappeared for three endless days. And much changed afterward.
A slender child fell into a hole just 30 cm in diameter. For forty meters. A dark gut. He got stuck. After a few hours, his screams were heard. From then on, for 60 hours, many things happened around that black hole. Many things went wrong. The book brings incredible things to mind; to read them today, it makes me think that I had suppressed those events. The book now throws memories in my face. I knew everything. But I remembered nothing. A single camera with a fixed-sequence shot on the well. Vans arrived around to sell sandwiches, drinks, and ice creams to onlookers. Three Rai networks followed the affair. A live broadcast on all networks for 18 hours. Dwarfs, contortionists, gigantic drills, heroes, firefighters, speleologists, tragic choices, screams, despair. Mistakes, bad luck, media exposure. Twenty thousand people physically present around the well. President Pertini with headphones. "There was a Felliniesque atmosphere", they said. The parents of all Italy, but especially my whole generation, were forever shocked by that event. Mothers crying. Fathers staying up late into the night watching a fixed image on a hole in the dusty, arid ground and a bustle of people around it. And I remember a sadness and heaviness that I never knew again. I had real difficulty reading this book. Physical pain, discomfort, sickness. I don't think it ever happened to me. Reading just one chapter and wanting to throw the book off the balcony. Reading the title of the next chapter and being left breathless. Reading certain sentences and wanting to cry. Foolishly deluding yourself that this time there was a happy ending. I find myself as a child hoping in front of that big brown-framed TV with the curved screen. It's incredible how this story stayed hidden under the ashes of my consciousness ready to explode, like a mine stepped on by chance. For a few days, I've felt a strange necessity, an urgency to rediscover what happened. But I'm doing it, maybe, to definitively overcome what was a real shock for me. And I believe for many other children of the time. I have neither the courage nor the desire here to retell that tragedy. But I feel it's necessary at least to share certain emotions. Especially to remember how a media event could have so impressed those who experienced it. Maybe something similar happened with September 11, 2001, for today's kids. But I'm not sure. The emotion is certainly different. The nation stopped; incredibly, it stopped. The television broadcast reached peaks of viewership never again reached, not even by the World Cup finals. It was calculated that 30 million Italians remained in front of the screen while the only three national channels broadcasted that live coverage.
How could one listen to the heartbreaking cry of a child, in the 1 PM newscast, coming from the depths of a well and come out unscathed? Sciascia wrote on the occasion "It was a night like the first moon landing: then the triumph of technology; now its tragic defeat. One can go to the moon, but one cannot save a child fallen into a well". After the extremely bitter conclusion of the affair, followed arguments, trials, poisons. Italy, expecting a happy ending, plunged into a gloomy and suffered depression. Alfredo's body saw the light again almost a month later. We, the children of the '80s, discovered in the crudest and nastiest way that even a smiling child in a striped tank top could die in summer. Calling for his mother. Die as we could have died. Without fault. With hundreds of rescuers without possibilities. Swallowed by the earth. Stuck, injured and forced between rock and cold mud. Suffocated. In the dark. That fairytales did not exist. That superheroes did not exist. That life could be a nightmare from which no one could pull us out. "The board got stuck and won't come out"; "Mom, don't tell me lies, I don't believe you anymore..."; "Alfredino, these noises you hear are coming from Mazinga who is coming to save you"; "Help, not in a quarter of an hour! Pull me out right now! I can't take it!"; "I have to pee, how do I do it?"; "Enough!!! Go down and pull my son out!"; "He slipped from my hands"; "He's gone, he slipped further down...". Poor, little Alfredino.
Page 179, "What has befallen the Italians is a true national mourning. A true mourning, not ritual. It's as if everyone had lost a son, a nephew, a brother. It is pain that for many will find no expression and will take the forms of a deep and silent depression."
Page 214, "..Rai ended up making millions of people live in a nightmare from which, like all nightmares, one could hardly detach oneself. The return to reality was extremely traumatic.... As for the child audience, the consequences have been very serious. I know of several children in the grip of anxiety, who wake up in a start, at night, thinking of little Alfredo. And the same nightmares have been awakened in the adult world."
Page 222, "Rai, with the psychodrama it was representing, gave a further push to act in the wake of emotions. But in psychodramas, there is always the figure of the therapist who takes responsibility for organizing and rationalizing emotions. In Vermicino there was no one to perform such a function...and this contributed to shocking the viewers."
Page 223, Sciascia "It was a tragedy without catharsis".
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