«Rome was my city in Italy and now I can’t find it anymore, perhaps like all the old people, or the elderly, to put it as politically correct would have it. But it wasn’t always like this… In a not too distant time I found it again.” Eric Salerno it is a historic, great signature of journalism. For 30 years correspondent from Jerusalem of «Il Messaggero», special correspondent and expert on Africa and the Middle East, began his career as a reporter in Rome. He reconstructs those years in a volume not of memories but of authenticity contemporary city history: «Ghosts in Rome». The narrative pretext it’s a walk in Rome deserted by the pandemic in April 2020. Here are the ghosts of the past. But Salerno avoids the trap of nostalgia, of simple anecdotes, of purely personal memories to transform those past professional experiences into many pieces that constitute the roots of today’s Rome.
The Vatican security services
The first episode seems like the metaphor of crisis which today crosses the Vatican. It’s September 26, 1962, Eric Salerno is a very young reporter «Evening Country»a few days earlier a mysterious attacker had placed (undisturbed) some devices in San Pietro and so the newspaper decides to test the Vatican security services. Salerno, in those hours of maximum alarm, enters (also undisturbed) with a package under his arm, a facsimile of a possible bomb. And so the newspaper can shoot on the front page «St. Peter’s at 12/Despite police and searches the attacker could have done an encore!».
The years of the Dolce Vita
Those who are attached to the character of Rome will love the pages on the best years of the Sweet life. They are the bright ones early 60s in which Moravia, Pasolini, Guttuso And Purified they find themselves in a trattoria in Piazza dei Ricci (now a luxurious restaurant secured by bodyguards for Hollywood stars and other international celebrities) where at more than affordable prices you can eat Roman style, including simple carafes of wine and tap water, where simple people sit next to famous names: one of the great Roman pleasures, today killed by the crazy prices of certain menus. It appears obviously Fellini, which studies authentic photographers to arrive at the Paparazzi archetype. A very timely and great lesson in journalism comes with the page dedicated to a scoop. Salerno discovers that Alfred Hitchcock he is in a hotel in Ischia with his wife to rest before presenting «Psycho» in Rome. Director Fausto Coen listens to the proposal and responds: «Try. What does it cost us?” This is a phrase that anyone who really wants to be a journalist should repeat every day, right up to the end of their working life, in the morning. And so Salerno shows up at breakfast time: and the Master, amazed by his young age and courage, not only receives him but also talks with him for two hours about the mystery of the sensational Ghiani-Fenaroli case.
The attack on the Synagogue in 1982
Obviously there are tragic pagesas the Palestinian terrorist attack of 9 October 1982 on the SynagogueThe cholera in Bari in 1973 (the director of «Il Messaggero» sends him there because he knows that Salerno, in constant coming and going to Africa, is protected by vaccines). There is no rhetoric in these pages, but the testimony of a journalistic passion who contributed, here in Rome, to writing authentic chapters of our contemporary story.
