Monday, November 26

Only one hundred steps away...

I recently re-watched a beautiful movie called "I Cento Passi" (One Hundred Steps). It reached international acclaim a few years back together with more popular movies about organized crime, a denunciation of Mafia and its effects on the lives of many people who coexist with it. "I cento passi" (one hundred steps) was the distance between the Impastatos' house and the house of Tano Badalamenti, an important Mafia boss, in the small Sicilian town of Cinisi. The movie is the story of Peppino Impastato, a young left-wing activist that in the late seventies (when almost nobody dared to speak about Mafia, and several politicians maintained that Mafia did not even exist) repeatedly denounced Badalamenti crimes and the whole Mafia system using a small local radio station, with the arm of irony. In 1978 Peppino (30 years old) was killed by an explosion. The police archived the case as an accident or a suicide, but his friends never accepted this thesis. Note: This is a true story. More than wenty years after Peppino's death, the case has been re-opened. Tano Badalamenti, meanwhile, has been convicted in USA for drug traffic. I thought again about it this morning, whilst stuck in a traffic-jam caused by an abandoned vehicle on the side of a narrow city road. The car hadn't properly been abandoned by its owners. The car had previously been stolen and, under the owner's refusal to pay money to get it back, the robbers burnt it and left it on the side of the road, a so called unpaid "cavallo di ritorno" (return horse). You see I often wonder what you think about this. As a southern Italian, even if from a rather privileged background, I am aware and accustomed to all these idiosyncrasies. Weird. Weired that one can live so close to injustice, those physical hundred steps that suddenly become conceptual, ideological, moral and back and be accustomed to it.


"I Cento Passi" - Modena City Ramblers

6 comments:

Luca said...

sono finito casualmente sul tuo blog... Springsteen eh??! è uno dei miei cantanti preferiti!!
spero passerai sul mio blog... c' è anche uno scritto sul Boss, un tributo...
www.paradisoartificiale.blogspot.com
a presto,
Luca

el loco oficial said...

I've just orderer today a book about the Mafia for my mother. It seems to be good so I'll read it after her.

Cayetana Altovoltaje said...

I'm sorry to break the mood of your great post, but you had me ROTFL with "Peppino Impastato"... sorry, it's just too funny! :D

The Wee Italian Chick said...

Benvenuto,Luca! Anch'io ho dato una sbirciatina al tuo blog e,se nn ti dispiace,mi sa che ti faro' ancora visita - tres interessant!

El Loco Oficial: What's the book's title? Sounds interesting.

Bea: You little monkey! Have fun in Espana and c ya on Mon,xx

el loco oficial said...

Cosa Nostra by John Dickie :)

Anonymous said...

As a straniera in italy and one who lived in Sicily - I was always and still am fascinated by the Mafia! like a lot of things - I want to believe the best about them but know that that can be a fairytale but they get on with it and I am not sure if italy can ever be rid of the Mafia cos of the influence it has in so many areas of italian life!! Cosa Nostar - literally "our thing". I would love for Italy to be free of the Mafia, but reckon the country could fall apart!! Not sure where I stand but injustice is there in heaps!!!