There was an attempt, just a year ago, to save thehistorical archive of the Italsider Club: the memory of twenty years of glorious activity carried out at Masseria Vaccarella. An attempt, to tell the truth, undoubtedly made without knowing the bitter end that monumental collection of documentation had already met. Yes, because as testified in the first episode of this investigation by the former director of the club, Elio Donatelliof the archive that was transferred from Masseria Vaccarella to the interior steel plant there was no longer any trace in the years immediately following the closure of that engine of art, culture and sport that had been Vaccarella.
But let’s go to the most recent facts.
On 9 June 2023, therefore exactly one year ago, the former steel manager, the engineer Biagio De Marzowrote a letter to the newly installed plant manager, Vincenzo Dimastromatteo. Objective: «To trace, if it still exists, the historical archive of the Taranto steel industry».
De Marzo and Dimastromatteo are not unknown to each other. They were colleagues in that establishment. And De Marzo cares a lot about preserving the history that has developed inside and outside the steel industry. History which is also that of thousands of workers who sacrificed themselves for state steel and of people of intellect, like Giuseppe Francobandierahistoric director of the Italsider-Vaccarella Club, who wanted to support his work with the construction of a cultural route from which the entire city benefited.
«At the beginning of Italsider’s history – writes De Marzo to Dimastromatteo – it was settled (the archive, ed.) in a corporate/social office in the city, at the bottom of Corso Umberto; then he was transferred to Vaccarella and from there he returned to the factory when Vaccarella, rejected by Riva, was taken over by the unions”. De Marzo explains that he has already started research: «I spoke about it in vain with Marasciulo, the ancient librarian. Yesterday afternoon, by pure chance, at the Navy Officers’ Club, I met the surveyor Massimo Perrini, an old Italian from the MEM, still smart. I learned that he himself, around 1995, transported that archive from Vaccarella to a factory building without knowing what happened to it afterwards.”
Here then is the request that De Marzo makes to Dimastromatteo: «Can you authorize me and Perrini to pay a visit to the factory, obviously accompanied by security, etc., to see if there is still anything to be found?». The news that De Marzo received from Perrini is quite precise: «The area is the one where perhaps there is still the monumental fountain, built in the early 1980s by MEM based on an artistic project by Perrini and my TES for the electrical and hydraulic parts”. De Marzo also attaches the photo to the letter «of the area where the building was also located (cylinder storage?) where Perrini remembers having downloaded Vaccarella’s material”.
But no response follows that letter. Absolute silence from the director Dimastromatteo and from the company. As if memory and history were of no use.
More fortunate, so to speak, was Elio Donatelli who, worried about tracking down the voluminous documentation that he himself had packed to be transported from Vaccarella to the steelworks, managed to obtain some answers: that load of memory had been miserably devoured by mice. No one had bothered to preserve it. Like no one so far, anyone has cared about preserving the Masseria Vaccarella, the stage for major events whose protagonists were world-class names in art, music, cinema and sport.
