Benevento, raped at 15 and committed suicide. Her father’s revenge, 10 years later – Libero Quotidiano

It is well known that Italian comedy in its various forms was a very precise excavation of our national character, and the news only confirms how, in many cases, what we saw on the screen was an anticipation of reality.

Let’s take Monicelli’s masterpiece from ’77, “Un borghese piccolo piccolo” (from a novel by Vincenzo Cerami), with an amazing Albero Sordi who plays a modest state employee who, on the morning he is accompanying his only son to the coveted competition in the ministry in which he has worked all his life (certainly he will pass, thanks to the support of a farcical Masonic lodge to which he has opportunistically affiliated), he sees him killed by machine gun fire from a robber. The climax of the film is the preparation and execution of the revenge of this destroyed man, who no longer has any other reason to live.

The role of Sordi recalls the story of Lucio Iorillo, 64 years old, worker from the Benevento area. In 2008 the daughter committed suicide: a few months earlier, 15 years oldit had been raped and the trauma had made her existence unbearable. The man accused of the rape, the pastor Giuseppe Matarazzo, was sentenced to 11 years and 6 months. In 2018, having served part of his sentence, Matarazzo was released from prison and a month later, in front of his house, he was executed with two gunshots to the chest coming from a car driven by two men. The investigation into the assassination led to the indictment of Giuseppe Massaro And Generous Nasta. The judicial process was tortuous: sentenced in 2021 in the first instance to life imprisonment, the two were then acquitted by the Court of Appeal of Naples in 2023, and finally the Supreme Court annulled the acquittal sentence. Now the Benevento prosecutor’s office is trying to completely reconstruct the picture, inserting a fundamental piece, the instigator of the murder, who would be the father of the girl who killed herself, Iorillo: he would have organized the crime after paying (only in part) 20 thousand euros. In November, the designated Gup will have to decide on his indictment, while a new appeal trial for the two alleged killers is looming.

If the accusatory system is confirmed, there is an undoubted similarity between life and cinematographic fiction. In the film, a candid and good-natured boy was killed, and a father who prided himself on being his guide and protector cannot imagine any other compensation than revenge, by robbing and, immediately afterwards – in spite of himself, because he would like to enjoy his role as tormentor for a long time -, killing the criminal, who he had deliberately pretended not to recognize at the time of the confrontation at the police station. Here we have a father whose minor daughter was raped, who, as a consequence of that violence, kills herself. As in the character of Sordi, the man has no faith or consideration in criminal justice. For years he waits for the culprit to return to freedom to make him pay. It matters little that in the film the revenge is taken personally, and here through third parties. The psychological profiles, the motives, the dynamics are very similar.

At the end of the film, after having also lost his wife, Sordi’s character, a useless old pensioner who spends his mornings on a bench in a small garden, is insulted by another young man, and in the final sequences he follows him in his small car, meditating similar revenge. The spiral of violence, once triggered, has no end: it applies to individuals and nations. What is surprising is that, in ten years, nothing and no one has managed to dissuade – if the accusations are proven – the girl’s father from his murderous intentions.