Sicily is the place where the mafia once oppressed the servants whom the State could not protect. In the seventies, Michele Reina, Piersanti Matarella and Pio La Torre were left alone in the political war in which they were involved until they became important victims of the mafia. Just like Cesare Terranova, the judge who first investigated the criminal organization. Or Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, the gendarmerie general who fought him. Later in the nineties Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino would fall.
In that war, the good guys had reason to feel abandoned by the bad guys. Falcone had a great understanding of the State, but he also had a high dose of skepticism towards it. No, as he began to write, like Sciascia, who felt that he needed the state but stopped believing in it. His was less a doubt than a skepticism that came from a methodical doubt that reinforced his own beliefs. For him, the retreat into family, clan, group, so typical in Sicily, meant the internalized duality between society and state, turning one’s back on the rules of collective life, providing the excuse for living in perfect anomie. Or, in the worst cases, violently confronting them.
Roberto Saviano constructed Falcone based on the loneliness of the brave. Brave Loners is a story spanning almost fifty years, caught between two explosions. The first was in an alley in Corleone in 1943; the second in 1992, on the Punta Raisi-Palermo highway, just before the Capaci junction. One of them killed Salvatore’s father, Giovanni Riina, known as Totò, who was only twelve years old at the time; the other purged Giovanni Falcone, after a lifetime of searching for evidence to convict that gangster and murderer who ordered and committed murders as if they were nothing. Three agents from his bodyguard and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, who was also a judge, also died.
In the end, Falcone succeeded in framing Riina and obtained an irrevocable life sentence for himself and other Cosa Nostra bosses and underbosses responsible for hundreds of crimes, but the problem of arresting and imprisoning him remained. And for this sentence, the mafia boss took revenge on the judge with the Capaci bomb: the second bomb that marked his existence, after the one he received from his father half a century ago when he tried to disable an allied device to obtain explosives. The two bombs, then, point to the tragic meaning of the story left to us by Saviano, a writer who knew like few others what it was like to live under the threat of crime.
Between these two explosions lies an important part of Italian history: the mafia and anti-mafia, the connivance of crime and legal power, and the solitary resistance of those who want to break these ties. The terror imposed by Kalashnikov shots and dynamite, those trying to stop it with the only weapon of the law, the fear that inevitably grips those who decide to challenge a seemingly invincible opponent, and the courage required to overcome it. . It then consisted of facing, without fainting, the traps and ambushes of enemies and false friends who were supposed to be fighting on the same side and who instead hindered you with the excuse that the desire for success and power, not the desire for justice, was behind your fight. The latter was what began to hit Falcone hard; the discouragement of feeling alone and being unfairly accused.
Despite this, he never gave up and overcame the obstacles that came his way. He discovered the connections between families belonging to the criminal world who were in close contact with the political world. Saviano tells this well, thanks to extensive documentation compiled with journalistic precision and rereadings of documents by Falcone and his colleagues. He later befriended some of them, established secret relationships, and had to helplessly witness their deaths through ambushes and attacks. Cesare Terranova, judges Rocco Chinnici and Gaetano Costa; state police officer Boris Giuliano; Commissioner Ninni Cassarà and Palermo Governor Dalla Chiesa are just a few of them. They all paid a heavy price for the state’s understanding in the name of justice they believed in.
Falsely accused, vilified by some media outlets, accused of separatism and threatened with death, the judge faced great hostility from civil society. He confessed several times to his family and friends that he felt the breath of death on his neck.
The day will come. Saviano writes: “At 17 hours 56 minutes 48 seconds, a hole resembling a lunar crater opens on the Palermo-Mazara del Vallo highway. (…) Giovanni and Francesca see the world turned upside down. And they don’t, they’re not wrong. The world turned, turned on its back like a dying turtle. The explosion shakes them as if they were leaves, little fronds of flesh and sharp scrap metal in the middle of a firestorm. Everything is falling apart; glass, iron, bones, bodies. The power of the explosion does not amaze the replica. “Nothing can be saved in that metal trap.”
The author of the book Brave Alones draws a chronological line from the eighties with his writings, testifying to the courage of men who felt alone in fighting an enemy protected by certain forces and hidden in civil society. Behind the literature that explores details and emotions are real facts, documented and verified by sources and testimonies in the thirty years after the Capaci massacre and even in the thirty years before the story emerged.
Saviano thinks that long after that it is necessary to talk about Falcone again, to look at him again and try to tell everything as it is. Understanding the immense sacrifice and resignation of a Civil Servant is something he can understand through himself. That judge, who fought against the mafia with unprecedented determination, was a man who loved life, being with friends and good food. He was a man who, like all of us, was driven to revolutionary action because this is what it was like to fight against such an enemy in those conditions. He acted with faith.
Saviano wonders if this means that each of us can do the same thing, and says maybe it doesn’t. But he wanted everyone to be able to understand the magnitude of his resignation because of his spirit of service; for him it was nothing more than deep respect for the work of those who had been in his place and had been killed before. Brave Alone is a wonderfully constructed, transcendent episode of the fight against the mafia.