The tragedy, the ordeal and the greatness.
That afternoon thirteen years ago, I was in the editorial office and monitored the news that could concern our city. At a certain point, a terrible agency arrived, beaten at 3.55pm, accompanied by even more distressing voices.
One of our fellow citizens was involved in a terrorist attack in Lebanonon the edge of the highway that connects the Lebanese capital with the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon.
Even before journalistic confirmations, he provided a photo to confirm my painful foreboding. Almost contemporary”Compassion“, next to an unarmoured, and now completely crumpled, Unifil convoy, a rescuer was holding in his arms a soldier, devastated by the explosion and with his face reduced to a mask of blood, who I knew very well, a vigorous young man, a willing soccer player, a friend: Giovanni Memoli.
The general Antonio Bettelliconquered by the immense strength of the then corporal major, wrote a book entitled “Leontes“. This is how he says: “Leontes is Lebanon, therefore, but it is also the circumstance in which suddenly, on 27 May 2011, the then corporal major Giovanni Memoli underwent the experience that definitively changed his life: an explosion treacherously caused by unknown hands, initial viaticum of a still uninterrupted passion. At that juncture, made desperate by the need for assistance that Giovanni’s own family urgently brought to their dying son, I was in Beirut as Defense Attaché at our Embassy. From that circumstance, which revealed itself unexpectedly on a clear, almost summer afternoon in the Lebanese capital, I felt that the passion of Giovanni and his family had become, in the exercise of my duty, also my passion.“.
From that moment, Giovanni’s life, miraculously avoiding death, became an ordeal made up of hospitalizations and hopes, surgeries and rehabilitation.
This young forty-year-old, exemplary in his unparalleled strength of spirit, always striving to never be discouraged and to always confidently face the future, today a second lieutenant in the role of honor of the Army, has received, yes, many awards: on 2 June, for example, he will be in Rome for the solemn Republic Day parade.
But perhaps he would also like him to be accepted and showered with affection for what he is and always has been: a golden boy, not just an exceptional hero.
Like everyone, or more than everyone, I would add.
Certainly, we Bitontini cannot help but be proud of its paradigmatic greatness and continue to observe it with infinite esteem and admiration…
