Vito Alfieri Fontana talks about his conversion in Bitonto – BitontoLive.it

From manufacturer of war instruments to humanitarian operator: it is the transfiguration told by Vito Alfieri Fontana in the autobiographical book “I was the man of war”which will be presented Monday 20 May at 5pm in Bitonto, in multipurpose room of the Santi Medici Foundation. The journalist will dialogue with the author Nicola Lavacca.

The meeting is an initiative ofAiversity of the Third Age “Domenico Pastoressa”, with the Opera Santi Medici Foundation and the Municipality of Bitonto.

The mayor will speak Francesco Paolo Riccithe vice president of the University of the Third Age Francesco Ricci and the director of the Opera Santi Medici Foundation Giovanni Vacca. The author will introduce Vito Modesto.

THE BOOK

«I have designed, built and sold two and a half million anti-personnel mines. I have removed thousands of them, for almost twenty years, all along the mined ridge of the Balkans, from Kosovo to Serbia to Bosnia, putting homes, schools, factories, agricultural land, aqueducts and railway stations back into operation. These figures contain, symbolically, the two lives I have lived. From a numerical point of view, the balance is unequal. From that of my conscience too, because the evil done remains. Forever”. This is the lucid confession of Vito Alfieri Fontana.

For over twenty years, at the helm of the family business, he designed and produced mines and sold them in various countries around the world. Then, in the early nineties, his son asks him: «But are you, dad, a murderer?» triggering – in parallel with the launch of the international campaign to ban anti-personnel mines, also led in Italy by Gino Strada – a lacerating personal conversion. In 1993 Fontana decided to close the family business; in 1997 he went to Oslo as a consultant on the anti-mine campaign alongside the American activist Jody Williams, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for this commitment. Two years later his second life begins. With the NGO Intersos he began his commitment as a deminer in the Balkans, to allow the populations who had just emerged from the war a return to normality.

A dramatic story which, starting from the first-person account of an exceptional life, questions everyone on the responsibilities of individuals with respect to the facts of history.