Mario Calabresi: ‘I found the only memory of my father’

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It was the only memory he had of his father, he found it in an archive photo. A few days after the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, his son Mario told in his newsletter Altre Storie how he found photos of the parade he had been with his father on the Sunday before he was killed, on May 17, 1972.
The only fragment of memory that Calabresi has of the parent, murdered when the journalist was two years old, is that of having seen the band of Alpine troops in the center of Milan while he was sitting on his shoulder and having touched the golden trombone from which he was was impressed.
An episode of which Calabresi had already spoken, in his book “Pushing the night beyond”: “I was happy, I felt great, strong, proud to be on his shoulders, it seemed to me we had done something very brave. It was just a band of the Alpine troops, but I have carried it inside me since I was two years old”.
It had been there mother Gemma to help him reconstruct the context of that memory (“For days you had done nothing but tell about the trombone and you always had to listen to you all over again “) and thanks to an old diary, they were able to trace the date of the parade, May 14, 1972.
In that trombone that had remained etched in his memory for almost fifty years, Calabresi came across again in October 2019 during a visit to thePublifoto Archivenow acquired by Intesa Sanpaolo and in the process of being transferred to Turin. The journalist noticed that the images of the parade in Milan were stored in the archive and asked to see the negatives: “Almost immediately I found in my hands the photograph I had in my head since I was a child: that of the trombone. I couldn’t believe it. , I had before my eyes a wonderful golden bell, in the background the spiers of the Milan Cathedral “.
While continuing to review the images of the crowd, Calabresi wrote that he realized he was looking for a photo of a child on his father’s shoulders: “I found one with a head and ears similar to mine, only the shoulders and a gray jacket of the father could be sensed,” he says. It is impossible to determine if it was really him, even if the mother Gemma also found a similarity: “she asked me ‘Is it important to know if you were just that?’. No, that’s okay”, concludes the journalist.

Source: Ansa

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