I memories of my experiences in New York and London, between 1967 and 1974, and then arriving in Turin, have a double meaning.
On a personal level, they were years of growth. Leaving Genoa, in those still backward years, was like an elementary school child going to Harvard.
Italy was on the eve of great changes, but we didn’t know it yet.
I will give an example that may seem stupid and banal to many, but which for me instead shows the difference between the two worlds.
In the large Western countries there was a consolidated habit of working all day, in our area we still had a long two-hour break, which allowed people to go home and have their plate of pasta and maybe even a nap.
The professional experience, however, was quite disappointing. Italian correspondents abroad, at least in those days, were afflicted by a strange disease, a form of snobbery that made them feel superior to the rest of the world.
In reality they worked very little, mainly using local sources, English and American newspapers and news agencies. A legend of those times was Ugo Stille, New York correspondent of the Corriere della Sera, of which he would also be director in the future. Colleagues said that Stille was good but that it was easy to be good having access to the real-time articles that would appear the next morning in the New York Times in whose office the Corriere correspondent worked based on an agreement between the two companies.
Bernardo Valli, a legend
Personally, I remember two exceptions, Bernardo Valli and Ezio Mauro. Valli, based in Paris, mainly covered the East: he knew those lands well from having traveled them with his legionary boots in his youth.
I was in Paris the evening the appointment of Boutros Ghali as Secretary General of the UN was announced. He was also in Paris in those days, Valli knew him, called him and had the interview that same evening.
Mauro’s experience as a Moscow correspondent for Repubblica was only two years because he was then called to be deputy director of the Turin Press.
But in those two years, among the worst of the post-Soviet period, Mauro gave the best of himself, working in the shadow of the Kremlin as he had done as a reporter in Turin and then in Rome.
His rival and yardstick was not his colleague from Corriere della Sera but David Remnick, then correspondent of the Washington Post and, subsequently, and still to this day, editor of the New Yorker.
I went to visit him in Moscow at that time and was able to see for myself what a hell of a correspondent Mauro was.
Even on a human level, the Italian correspondents from abroad suffered from a strange disease of arrogance and arrogance. Never an invitation for a beer or a coffee, much less for a dinner. The only great generous person was Luigi Forni, London correspondent for Resto del Carlino and la Nazione in the 1970s.
Forni, a great friend
Forni was a great character and his friendship honored me until the day he passed away. He was Neapolitan, and he had all the age-old wisdom of a Neapolitan. He had disputed with his sisters and brothers-in-law, an enormous silver statue of San Gennaro which dominated the corridor of his house in London. But I’ll never go back to Naples.
Before London he had been in Bonn. And before that in Rome, in the editorial office of Il Mattino di Napoli, where he had been transferred following his hiring after a long Neapolitan internship.
At the time, Mattino di Napoli, Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno di Bari and Gazzetta del Popolo di Torino had an agreement to exchange articles from abroad and from Italy. A chance meeting in a restaurant in Rome determined the turning point in Luigi Forni’s career.
Forni had invited an employee of the German embassy to lunch. At a nearby table was sitting Ugo Zatterin, future commentator on the single-channel Rai television, at the time a political commentator for the Gazzetta del Popolo, with the director of the same Gazzetta.
Forni looked at them and said softly to the girl: “Speak to me in German, I will pretend to understand and answer you.”
Zatterin was struck by this even if he didn’t let it be known at the time. But when a few months later the Gazzetta’s Bonn correspondent resigned, Zatterin remembered it and to the director, desperate for a replacement, he simply said: “Why look, we have Forni who knows German”.
With a hint of vainglory, many years later, in my home in Rome, I met Forni and Zatterin again, both of whom had become my friends in the meantime. It was a nice and touching moment.
It was in that period that Caracciolo decided to launch an all-Abruzzo newspaper, the center of Pescara. Mario Lenzi had chosen as the machine man of the new newspaper, a great and unknown figure in our publishing industry. Carlo Pucciarelli. However, Lenzi feared the impact of a communist in a very very white region and asked me for a suggestion for a moderate director to head the operation.
Zatterin had re-entered the great game of management, taking on that of Rai’s Tg2. I proposed his name and Lenzi liked it. So Zatterin lived in Pescara for three years, contributing significantly to the diffusion of the newspaper, given his television fame.
On January 29, 1974, 51 years ago, my new life began in Turin. On June 6, 1984, 41 years ago, my new life in Rome began.
Between these two dates lies the best period of my life: I was thirty and at that age life is always better than at 80.
The fact remains that Turin is truly magical. More magical for those who work and commit themselves and are also helped by a bit of luck.
As a Genoese I considered the Turin people perhaps a little too expansive. But the fact remains that in Turin I found some of the best friends of my life.
The professional experience was nothing short of exhilarating. The most important thing I did in my life was introducing Computer Press to the newsroom, a national event. Having succeeded through persuasion (and the help of some good incentives) is one of the few things in my life that I feel proud of.
Another thing that I had begun to study together with the director, Giorgio Fattori, was a project to transform La Stampa, a Turin newspaper, into a national newspaper through an edition edited from Rome, on the model of the American Herald Tribune, thanks precisely to the prospects offered by “cold” technologies for the composition of newspapers.
So that you don’t miss any details, I’ll start from that January 29th. Until a few days before I had been an editor, the third of three, in the Ansa news agency’s office in London. On the 29th I would have taken up my new job as assistant to Giovanni Giovannini, managing director of La Stampa as well as president of Fabbri editorial and EFI, a holding company now in the process of being dismantled by order of Fanfani, established a few years earlier by Carlo Caracciolo together with his brother-in-law Gianni Agnelli.
My luck was that my predecessor, Luca Grassi, had married Giovannini’s daughter which made it impossible for him to remain in the role.
I had met Giovannini through a banal circumstance: an article I had written as a correspondent for La Stampa from Genoa in 1972 on a meeting between Ugo La Malfa and Genoese entrepreneurs. Malfa was famously the “godfather” of the press director of the time, Alberto Ronchey. Giovannini, with his always friendly, gruff and polemical manner, had called me from Turin one morning to make some comments on the piece and advising me to be careful because Malfa was a hot topic for the newspaper.
I took the opportunity of that first contact to introduce myself, a few months later, to Giovannini, who in the meantime had moved from deputy editor to managing director of the newspaper, to ask him for advice: Ansa wanted to send me to London, what did you suggest?
In my little Genoese brain, my dream was that Giovannini would tell me: don’t go, we’ll hire you full time (I was only a part time correspondent pursuant to art. 12), stay with us.
Giovannini did what I would have done later in life, he didn’t take the bait and asked me: “How old are you? “Twenty-seven”, I replied. And he: “At your age I would have gone on one leg. Let’s keep in touch, write to me.”
Between 1972 and 1974 we exchanged some letters. It was May 1973 when you went to visit him on a Saturday afternoon in late spring. In Turin the lime trees were in bloom. I went from Genoa accompanied by the now ninety-year-old Aldo Repetto. I was driving a brand new Fulvia coupe.
Giovannini was alone in his large office on the fifth floor of the building in via Marenco which housed a Fantozzian suite by Agnelli (complete with red carpet) in the IFI headquarters (on the seventh and top floor).
The IFI is the industrial financial institution, at the time the financial holding company of the Agnelli group.
We talked for a while and then he mentioned the prospect of employment with him. In the meantime, he commissioned me to study cable television which had made its debut in London. Write it in English, he recommended.
Almost thirty years after the end of the war, the monopoly of state radio and TV was about to end throughout Europe. Telebiella began in Italy. Berlusconi’s genius seized the opportunity.
They were times of great turmoil: “Free radios”, “free TVs”, “End of the state monopoly”, “Down with RAI”. From a ship moored offshore in the English Channel, Radio Luxembourg broadcast uncensored songs.
Giovannini and those at IFI also entertained the idea of an entry into TV. For months we would have consumed ourselves in useless accounts: in a period in which money cost up to 25%, any investment would have led nowhere. But this was yet to come.
In that summer of 1973, I dragged myself to Greenwich, where the first experiments with cable television had been made, only to discover that those who had started the initiative had not done so in the name of freedom of expression but simply to sell more TV sets. In Greenwich the BBC signal was bad and two shopkeepers in the area had decided to remedy this.
My report passes the examination of Giovannini and also that of Alberto Vitale, at the time director of IFI investments and therefore his direct superior. In the years that followed, Vitale would move to New York, where he would begin a fabulous career, rising from managing director of Bantam Books to president and CEO of Random House, the largest book publisher in the world. He had a fixed table in one of the most beautiful restaurants in the world, the Four Seasons, on the ground floor of the Seagram skyscraper, the one designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Once we were in New York, Caracciolo and myself were also invited for lunch.
He would become my friend in the following years, I am honored by the fact that he still follows my news and the Cronaca Oggi bulletin today.
So it was that I was judged suitable for the role of Giovannini’s assistant, the hiring was decided, the salary was set, the date was agreed, precisely the end of January 1974.
While waiting I treated myself to a cruise in the Mediterranean on the Raffaello. I remember arriving in Istanbul sailing the Bosphorus. The minarets barely emerged from the morning fog: it was a very emotional experience. We also stopped in Beirut just a few months before the civil war that devastated Lebanon from 1975 for 15 years began.
Traveling on one of the great Italian ships of the post-war period was something unique and unforgettable that today’s cruise tourists, closed inside air-conditioned boxes and fed with pre-cooked and frozen foods, cannot even imagine.
The two sister ships, Michelangelo and Raffaello, were built when transatlantic air transport did not yet have the development it later achieved. In six days of sailing we went from Genoa to New York. There were three classes, the third filled with emigrants returning home or returning to America after a vacation in the country.
The crew was also divided into classes: the officers were Genoese with some from Trieste, the first class waiters were Genoese or Ligurian, the lower service workers were Neapolitans from Torre del Greco, and the simple sailors were Sicilian.
In first class the level of service was unrivaled: cuisine from a large restaurant, dancing every six days, outdoor living on the decks, weather permitting. When I made the crossing from Genoa to New York at the end of October 1968 the weather was not very kind.
The commander, one of Camogli who had the balls to send to hell even the president of the state holding company that controlled Italia Navigazione (and was then fired for this) and addressed his officers in Genoese, saying “scio”, (sir) had decided to go straight to New York, avoiding a long tour that would have taken us away from the storm, to save on fuel, also because he had a premium on saving.
That’s how we hit the bad weather: force six seas, the 250 meter long ship was going up and down and I could see the stern rising above my head from my observation point. Almost all the passengers had locked themselves in the cabin.
At the first class bar there were only me and an American of Danish origin left: Arnold Antonsen, importer of Italian furniture in New York, hard worker, gentle and generous man, introduced me to the delights of the Bloody Mary which I still prepare expertly today
In New York, Italy ships docked at Pier 90 on the Hudson. I go ashore and they tell me don’t worry, the taxi driver is Italian. I start to speak but I didn’t understand anything of what the taxi driver was telling me. He was Sicilian and spoke his dialect. Thus the entire generation of our migrants had brought their dialect of origin to North and South America but I think it represents a testimony to this.
I remember with emotion from those days in New York the meeting with a boy from my neighborhood in Genoa, Castelletto. Bruno Ceccarelli was first engineer on the American ship that cruised the Caribbean. Meeting up and walking down 42nd Street: an emotional moment.
But let’s go back to my first day of school in Turin.
The day before that January 29th I am in Genoa, I say goodbye to my parents and I go to dinner with my dear friends, Andrea Lizzo D’Angelo, Cesare Lanza, Andrea Poletti and Paolo Panerai with their respective wives.
After dinner, we have some problems with the old elevator at the D’Angelo house, then everything runs smoothly until departure.
Driving my Fulvia coupé I take the motorway for Turin, first the Genoa-Serravalle then the Tortona-Turin. Towards Alexandria a terrible fog envelops us, such as I have never seen in my life before. Even in England I had never managed to come across a bank of fog, the environmental policies of the English government had eliminated smog.
That first impact with the fog had a strange effect on me. Instead of feeling dismayed, I felt at home and thought it was an ancestral effect. My father had been born in those parts, in Alessandria, 80 years earlier. His family was originally from Spinetta Marengo, I think it was the fog factory.
I would find a similar fog a few years later on the road from Turin to Gassino, while I was going to Gianni Gambarotta’s house. I was driving, Giovannini at a certain point was forced to get off to find his way in the fog until at a certain point I lost him too.
However, the fatigue of driving made my eyes heavy.
With the thought of returning to the elevator at D’Angelo’s house that went up and down without anyone touching the buttons and the shiver of fear, but I managed to get to the Turin toll booth, I felt anxious. Then from the Du Park residence toll booth it was easy.
The day after my first day on the job, I was sitting at my new desk. A large meeting was held in Giovannini’s office with about ten managers. Of course, at one point the door opens wide and a black human bullet with a mustache comes out. It was Lio Rubini, a great figure in post-war Italian publishing, an extraordinary, fascinating character. Many things divided us but the dialect united us. Rubini was furious at the misdeeds of a Sicilian manager and called me to vent. It was enough to say to him: “whatever you want, Lio, or it’s a gabibbo” to calm him down. “You’re right, or it’s a gabibbo” and he hung up calmly.
