Each of us, sooner or later, lives and recognizes our moment Sliding Doors. That unpredictable moment that can permanently change a person’s life. That of Giovanna Botteri it is linked to a phone call that reached her while she was in Afghanistan, as a correspondent. On the other end of the phone was her daughter Sarah (born from the relationship with the journalist Lanfranco Pace from whom she separated), she was little and crying she asked her to go home. «And I came back», said Giovanna Botteri in a long interview given to Corriere della Sera. «I was in Afghanistan with Maria Grazia Cutuli (journalist of Courier of the Sera, killed near Kabul the day after this phone call, November 19, 2001, ed). In the evening my Sarah called me crying and I didn’t join Maria Grazia’s convoy, I took a car to the airport, to return to Rome. And I was saved, life is incredible. I told this episode to Maria Grazia’s mother.”
Giovanna Botteri began her extraordinary professional career at the Rai headquarters in Trieste and then in Rome, from where she started to tell the wars and crucial moments of recent history: from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the war in Croatia, then Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo, where he feels he left his heart. «Sandro Curzi, director of Tg3, sent me there. He told me two fundamental things: be careful and tell what you see. It’s a mantra every time I leave. It left a profound mark on me. On the front there were great correspondents, Pulitzer Prize winners, I was the only young woman with a daughter, a different element of the classic group of war correspondents: a “boys club” and few women admitted and they were not mothers. My story was different from that of my male colleagues who saw things differently than mine. I claim it with pride.”
Then the many correspondences from New York and Beijing from which he reported on the pandemic. «I told the Italians about it before it happened in Italy. And when we saw the military trucks and those heartbreaking scenes of the dead alone in hospital, I was describing a country that was emerging from it. Maybe I represented hope.” And he adds: «When I walked the stretch of road from home to the office I was terrified that they would stop me on the street: they would test you for a fever and if you had even a low temperature, they would send you to a “Covid centre” and you would disappear. Furthermore, with the time difference, I always worked at night and in that darkness the anguish grew.”
Now that she has returned to Rome, from Paris where she worked as a correspondent in the last period, Giovanna Botteri wants to learn new things, like how to stand on a surfboard in the waves and why not, to fall in love again. «We always talk about love, my daughter is a child of love. Everything you do is done out of love.”. Among the new challenges there would also be a return to television «on another network», that is, alongside Massimo Gramellini, on The 7. «It was a natural choice. She had to go like this. After all, I am a free woman.”
