As
chance would have it, I happen to have been going to Cogne every summer for
over thirty years, and therefore know the morphology and topology of the place,
the mentality of the inhabitants of the valley, the values they share, their
customs, their attitude towards outsiders.
What I mean is that although I have experienced the notorious Cogne “Six and
half weeks”, the ones lapsing from the violent death of little Samuele to
the incrimination of the first accused for the crime, that is his mother,
through newspapers, radio and TV, I have nevertheless done so through a personal
and empirical representation.
Let us set aside the corpus of the crime, the fact that obviously relates
to the complicity of a number of people, questions about the cost of a house
in Cogne and of ‘that’ house in particular (that is the financial analysis
of the situation), or even this strange “epiphany” of the family in Cogne,
their appearance in the valley after having abandoned the Bologna province,
as in those American stories (which do not only belong to fiction) where a
couple or a family leaves Missouri for good, to move to Maine and start a
new life; or else the character of the psychiatrist (she therefore has a degree
in Medicine), who at first thinks that the child covered in blood may have
suffered an ictus (a local midwife – my first daughter was born in Aosta…
– or even a Cogne baker, would have made a more “realistic” comment); let
us set aside the most substantial aspects of the crime and let us get down
to the so-called “crime news” .
I know, it is a juicy bit of news, and from what it actually was (that is
anyhow a family tragedy), the very actors of the drama have transformed it
into a “thriller”, by offering a huge decoy to all mass media, which, as we
very well know, could not have wished for anything better.
Hence this tantalisation, this encampment of TV crews, this exhausting leak
of news and especially of non-news, which was in any case craved for by an
easily impressed public opinion, that could be easily encouraged towards the
“thriller product”, up to the statement made on behalf of the Press Federation
by its secretary Serventi Longhi, based on which all this was becoming too
much: sort of: “My dear, where on earth will all this lead us to?”: that is
a Samuele-case website with pay implications, almost as if it were a game
to take part in.
Well, dear Serventi, dear Longhi, dear colleagues, it is really useless and
hypocritical (very hypocritical) to complain about the fact that the horses
have bolted without even attempting to lock the stable door (just in case
there might have been any left inside). In the wake of the American model,
everything is a greatly desirable show, with an agreement of tastes (which
I would not define “amourous” as in Foscolo’s poetry) between news-peddlers
and scandal-addicts.
All this in the name of reporting duty, reporting right and freedom of
the press, which are presented as absolute values.
Whereas they are
not absolute, they are relative and depend on the circumstances, and the Cogne
case has become a real crime news, an overdose case where ethical sensitivity
has completely deteriorated, as an “ace up one’s sleeve” (or as another Vermicino-Alfredino
case), where the victim is already dead.
He was just a child, his name was Samuele, and maybe media operators
should think more about their own children....
traslation Interpres Sas
