Wilson, from the meaning of the name (‘determined protector’), Marconi, like the Roman road of that course now far away, but ‘tattooed’ in the heart. Many stories, personal and work memories, a single pseudonym to tell the story of the deputy commissioners of the State Police of the 71st course, the one that began on November 2, 1987. “That morning – he recalls Florence Maffei – one of the most beautiful periods of my life begins”.
“Commissioners – life stories”, Wilson Marconi Aletti Publisher (16 euros, also available as an ebook, cover designed by the commissioner Roberto Rapaccini) is that book you don’t expect: a surprise, for the humanity that shines through ‘liberated’ by the uniforms that accompanied the working life of a group of men and women for whom the Police was first a dream, then a road to emancipation, finally a difficult life path, in the various roles up and down Italy pursuing the career of a civil servantof the State Police, but it proved to be indispensable in becoming what I am today.
Each of the State Police Commissioners – 16 protagonists for a series of stories on a free theme, from personal stories to the most gripping police stories that happened at work – in the end she spoke from the heart, feeling the need to tell her story. “I caress the ivory silk, letting it slide over my waist – recalls Fiorenza Maffei, to whom the book owes a lot, citing the moments of her preparation for her wedding dress – perhaps I should have my sleeves lengthened, it will be April, but spring in Bologna is strange, a few years ago it even snowed, right on the day of the Police holiday …. “.
But then the phone rings, the wedding dress fitting is interrupted, the scene shifts from Piazza Maggiore, racing with music in the car towards the outskirts and towards new urgent investigations, at the crossroads between Bologna, Modena and Ferrara, “for some time now the thefts of large-engined cars have become a daily routine, so many, too many…”.
Another place, another scene. “It was 1992 and I had recently been transferred from Sardinia to Taranto. In those years, organized crime was rampant in the city, with shootings in the center and attacks…“, she recalls Maria Dolores Rucci, so much so that the police headquarters was reinforced with the Prevention and Anti-Crime Department, with the dispatch of a hundred police officers to the site. A well-known criminal was involved in a shooting and died during surgery in the operating room, Maria Dolores found herself managing the surreal situation with the dead man’s family and the neighborhood in revolt headed to the hospital. Pretending that he was still alive, the man, complete with IV, was transported to the mortuary.
Yellow shades, for adventurous lives, where the illumination of a dramatic and complex case can also happen by chance at the police station bar while having a chat with a colleague “on a day when she was sulking and insisted on not telling me anything”: as happened to the commissioner Raffaele Clemente, known as Maurizio, travel photo collector. How to find the unexpected thread of a twisted skein, which is ultimately life: “It seems that sometimes souls seek each other and when they get to look each other in the face …. They find each other, And there’s no way”, is the moral (read to believe!)
The book flows, there are many stories, but what holds the different characters together (who have never lost sight of each other in all these years, with meetings in every part of Italy, thanks also to social media and a bit of luck) is always the beginning of the story of those young people who, in the 80s, decide to become police commissioners. So Carla Foti tells the story of the beginning of a new life: “A new challenge was looming – she writes – to demonstrate that she was good and worth as much as or more than her male colleagues, overcoming the prejudices of the time. But that’s another story”.
It was basically “The life I wanted,” he sums up. Leila of Giulio, citing simple but indelible memories: “A flash, the morning of November 2, 1987, many years ago, boys with their suitcases next to each other, in an entrance room of a large building in Rome. We were waiting to enter the building and our future”. “When I remember those years – explains the commissioner Giusy Lamb – looking back, for a moment I think of the missed opportunities and the heavy sacrifices for a very young woman: and yet even today I think that I would do everything again and relive every moment of that period of my life”.