Rosaria Carpinelli Consulenze Editoriali - The Beginning of Darkness

On 11 June 1981, shortly after 1pm, Italy is paralysed in front of the TV. During Tg2, from a well in the countryside of Vermicino, near Frascati, comes the scream of a child calling his mother. ‘It is the cry of a child who wakes up in the night, in the heart of a monstrous nightmare, without knowing whether what he has experienced is reality or bad fantasy. It is the cry of a child who is deported, who sees his mother walk away and then disappear, around a bend. It is the cry of a child to whom an adult has done the most horrendous violence. It is all the cries of all the children in the world. All at once. All in one child.’ That scream, the interminable hours of anguish that followed, the name of the child - Alfredino Rampi - have been etched in the memory of Italians for thirty years. Who perhaps do not remember a coincidence: while Alfredino plunged into the well, in the late afternoon of 10 June, at 7 p.m., in San Benedetto del Tronto, a young aerialist, Roberto Peci, was locked in the boot of a 127 and taken to a ‘people's prison’, where the Red Brigades would have ‘tried’ him and then killed him to take revenge on his brother Patrizio, the first repentant of the Br. In his new book, Walter Veftroni recounts those two parallel tragedies. By retracing the locations and interviewing the protagonists, he reveals previously unpublished aspects and captures in the two episodes the beginning of what television would become: the great eye that transforms reality into reality.

Publication date: 02.05.2012
Publisher: Rizzoli
Country: Italy