"Beauty against fear" 100 more steps with Peppino Impastato

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09 May 2021 "If beauty were taught to people, it would be equipped with a weapon against resignation, fear and silence". Peppino Impastato was convinced of this, killed by the mafia 43 years ago, on 9 May

His dream-prophecy remains very topical. Like that of Paolo Borsellino who was also a victim of the mafia in

: "This land will become beautiful". The mafia is very bad for both, for the Sicilian judge the unbearable "stench of compromise", for Peppino "a mountain of shit".

In addition to 'The hundred steps' celebrated in the 2000 film by Marco Tullio Giordana, which in Cinisi separated the Impastato house from that of Tano Badalamenti, there is a real path to take, which however "it is certain, it is not eternal ", Giovanni Falcone once said, because the mafia is a curse that has its end inside. A path that everyone must undertake. Those 'steps' can mark the difference and become a marathon of memory - between sit-ins and cultural initiatives between Radio Aut in Terrasini, the farmhouse and Casa Memoria Felicia and Peppino Impastato in Cinisi, but also beyond the Strait - we want to continue to plow through a "field", to wear out the soles of shoes, a road that one does not want to leave to the men of dishonor.

In Cinisi, a Sicilian village squeezed between rock and sea, near the airport, where drug trafficking took off, a few meters separated the house of Peppino Impastato from that of Tano Badalamenti, who had grown up together in very different stories of Sicily itself. Peppino was intelligent, he did not accept silence, he wanted to understand until in

- the symbolic year - he rebelled like many young people against his father who has precise ties and kinship.

For Peppino - certainly aware - that rebellion has a very high price: it is a challenge to the mafia. With "Radio Aut" breaking the taboo of silence and with the weapon of ridicule that destroys the reverential climate around the mafia, Tano Badalamenti becomes "Tano Seduto" and the town of Cinisi is "Mafiopoli", the emblem of a crime organized more and more 'parallel' system with its dense network of alliances and interests. Impastato is a candidate for the municipal elections, he wants to fight the mafia by entering the institutions, but two days before the vote, in the spring of

someone blows him up: six kilos of TNT - the favorite weapon of the mafia of those years - on the tracks of the railroad. 

The murder coincides with the discovery in Rome of the body of Aldo Moro and is classified as suicide or terrorist act. Only twenty years later the Palermo prosecutor will indict Tano Badalamenti as the instigator of the assassination, his well-known and much contested neighbor.

Giordana's film awakens in the country the passion and indignation for the story of Peppino played by the great Luigi Lo Cascio. Almost everyone saw him and together with Peppino they met the exceptional figure of his mother, Felicia, fragile and very strong - it could not be otherwise - a crystal blade stuck in the heart of the ancient mafia. Before he died on December 7,

, at 88, Felicia keeps her son's memory high like a banner and, during the trial, she is not afraid to point the finger and look at the ferocious boss Tano Badalamenti connected by videoconference.

Then on April 11,

, after 24 years comes the life sentence of the mafia boss who sweeps away forever the attempts at misdirection that began on the morning of that tragic 9 May. The judges of the third section of the Court of Assizes, chaired by Claudio Dall'Acqua, adjudicator Roberto Binenti, explain in the reasons for the sentence that "the danger posed by so much irreverent and irritating breaking of the wall of silence was increasingly palpable to cause to believe that the solution of the problem was necessary and also urgent, given that the young man would soon be elected municipal councilor, according to reliable forecasts ". 

The boss is told and mocked by Impastato through the microphone of his radio: "There will also be a beautiful marina, already under construction and we will be able to arrange our fast canoes that will carry the white sand, tobacco, white as snow beyond the sea. ". The connection between his assassination and the boss was forcefully re-launched in May

, when the Education Office of Palermo, on the basis of the indications of the Instructor Rocco Chinnici, who had started the work of the first anti-mafia pool and he had been murdered in July

, he issues a sentence, signed by Antonino Caponnetto, in which the mafia matrix of the crime is recognized, but attributed to unknown persons.

Centro Impastato publishes in

the story of Giuseppe Impastato's mother, in the volume "La mafia in casa mia", and the dossier "Notissimi ignoti", indicating Badalamenti as the instigator of the son's crime, in the meantime sentenced to 45 years for drug trafficking in New York , in the "Pizza Connection" trial.

In January

the Court of Palermo sent a judicial communication to Badalamenti. In May

decided to dismiss the "Impastato case", reaffirming the mafia matrix of the crime. In June

, following the declarations of Salvatore Palazzolo, who indicated in Badalamenti the principal of the murder together with his deputy Vito Palazzolo, the investigation was formally reopened. In November

an arrest order is issued for Badalamenti, formally indicted. The

preliminary hearing of the trial against Vito Palazzolo took place on

10 March

, while Badalamenti's position was removed.

In

a committee on the 'Impastato case' was set up in the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission and on 6 December

a report was approved on the responsibilities of representatives of the institutions in misdirection. On 5 March

the Court of Assizes found Vito Palazzolo guilty and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. The following year comes the life sentence for Badalamenti. In

the keys to his house are handed over to the Impastato Cultural Association. It took over 30 years to walk those 'hundred steps', but they have not been walked in vain.